Apptopia: anonymous messaging app Sendit, which uses Snap Kit to work with Snapchat features, surges with 3.5M installs, two months after Snap banned Yolo, LMK
Context & Ripple Effects
Snap opened its login, Bitmoji, and Stories to outside developers with the 2018 launch of Snap Kit, and anonymous Q&A apps like Yolo and LMK were among the biggest beneficiaries until Snap suspended both after a lawsuit over a teen's death allegedly tied to bullying messages. Two months later, Sendit is showing the demand never left — it simply moved to the next Snap Kit-integrated app, racking up 3.5 million installs.
The playbook is familiar from the corpus: Hoop rode the same Snap Kit distribution channel to #2 in the App Store with virality mechanics built around Snapchat friend-making, and years earlier After School survived an App Store ban to raise $16.4M. Anonymous social apps built on someone else's graph keep regenerating.
First-order effects
- Yolo and LMK's suspension left their user base without an outlet, and Sendit is capturing that orphaned audience through an identical Snap Kit integration into Snapchat features.
- Sendit inherits not just Yolo's installs but its risk profile: an anonymous messaging layer on top of Snapchat aimed at the same teenage users who generated the lawsuit that got its predecessors banned.
Second-order effects
- Snap's app-by-app suspensions look like whack-a-mole — removing Yolo and LMK reallocated demand to Sendit rather than eliminating it, pressuring Snap to act at the platform-policy level instead of against individual developers.
- Every surge by a Snap Kit-dependent app deepens Snap's dependency dilemma: the kit is a growth and engagement channel, but each viral anonymous app attaches Snap's brand to content moderation failures Snap doesn't directly control.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, enforcement moves from naming individual apps to rewriting the terms of the API itself — which is where the coverage points, toward Snap updating its developer policies to ban anonymous messaging outright after further teen-safety lawsuits.
- The structural lesson echoes After School: banning an anonymous app rarely kills the category, so platforms controlling the underlying identity and distribution layer become the de facto regulators of anonymous social apps.
The trend: Demand for anonymous messaging keeps outpacing platform bans, shifting moderation responsibility upstream to the platforms — like Snap — whose SDKs and graphs make such apps possible in the first place.