Apple tends to find ways to kill popular apps, but this time, someone else is doing the job for them. Nikita Bier, an app maker with Midas Touch, announced his new product on Wednesday—an app called exploded which brings lost messages and texts directly to iMessage. Someone check Snapchat and see how they feel.

Explode is simple: it gives anyone with the app the ability to send texts and photos with a limited viewing window. Once they’re gone, they’re gone for good. Neither party needs to install the app to use it—only the sender needs to install the app, and they choose how long the text or image will be available.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am pleased to announce my latest app:

Introducing Explode
· Send missing texts and photos within iMessage
· Only the sender needs the app: Drop them right into your chats
· Screenshots are also blocked

Why did we build it? Explode is an app by any means. Yes, a… pic.twitter.com/mGwmoN28T8

— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) January 14, 2025

While the app is free to download, there are paid, premium features. For $39.99 per year or $7.99 per month, users can subscribe to Explode+ to receive screenshot alerts, block screenshots from being taken, review messages they’ve previously sent, and lock down views -look at the photo after sending it so it can be used.

If it sounds like Snapchat and its premium option, Snapchat+, that’s very intentional. Bier describes Explode as a “spite app,” a response to a bad experience he had with Snapchat.

“Two years ago, I met with the CEO of Snapchat to discuss the acquisition of my previous company. I shared openly how fast we were growing. Just one week later—on the Thanksgiving holiday—Snapchat stopped the our app from the SnapKit platform, which abruptly stopped our growth,” Bier WRITES on Twitter. “As Ghengis Khan once said: the greatest happiness is defeating your enemies, robbing them of their wealth and seeing them bathed in tears.”

Bier has extensive experience dealing with major technology players. He sold his first viral hit, an anonymous polling app called tbh, to Facebook afterward gathers more than two million daily users. His second major foray into the app game, an obscure praise-giving app called Gas, was sold on Discord after it topped seven million downloads—and based on the timeline Bier gave about his Snapchat beef, it’s likely the app he’s talking to the company about.

So, will Explode be able to put a dent in Snapchat’s userbase? There is a very good reason to be skeptical. The ephemeral nature of the loss of texts and images is undoubtedly a selling point of Snapchat, the gamification of such communications also prevents people (usually teenagers) from returning. Snapchat Streaks—a record of how many days two people have sent messages back to back—are there true social capital of teenagerslike Snapchat trophies, and friendship labels are assigned based on how often users interact with each other.

Snapchat’s secret sauce isn’t the missing messages—which have been successfully replicated by almost every app at this point, including Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Telegram. It’s addictive social gamification, that’s for sure not good for the general well-being to people obsessed with friendship metrics, but probably good for Snapchat’s longevity.