Bang With Friends Has Cleaned Up Its Act, Returning To Apple's App Store Under A New Name
If you miss being able to scour your Facebook connections looking for a one night stand with someone you already know, or if for some reason you thought you needed an app to do that, never fear!
Bang With Friends has been absent from Apple's App Store for the past few months but it has finally gotten approval, under a new name, "Down".
"Guess who's back...back again!" reads an official email from Colin Hodge, the app's CEO and co-founder, titling their press release a behind-the-scenes look at their saga with Apple, who pulled the app just ten days after its mobile launch in May after citing objectionable content.
Bang with Friends, which launched earlier this year, had a simple premise: anonymously pick which of your Facebook friends you were interested in hooking up with and if they felt the same about you, the app would notify you both. Then it was up to you to either initiate or be satisfied with the knowledge of each other's interest; a perfect storm. Similar to Tinder, which markets itself as a dating app, Bang's purpose was to provide its users with a virtual gateway to sexual activity; a red-flag for Apple.
Another issue? Zynga, the social network game development company that created Words with Friends, filed a lawsuit against Hodge back in July for infringing on its "with friends" trademark.
As of yesterday, the app returned with a new identity - "Down" - encouraging you to once again anonymously browse through your Facebook friends, this time in a G-rated fashion.
In an official statement provided to Business Insider, Hodge explains "Down", still referring to it as BWF, as Google had no qualms with the original app which still remains in the Android Google Play Store.
BWF is all about honest intents and cutting through the bullshit. With that in mind, we're trying out an option to hang with your friend first. So if you're more interested or comfortable with saying you're "Up for Hang"ing with your friend instead of saying "I'm Down" (to bang) with your friend, you can say so!
In other words, users can opt to be even more passive aggressive by using this third party app to notify someone they are already friends with that they would like to hang out as friends.
Hodge even discloses some pro-tips, saying in the wake of Apple's pulling Bang With Friends from their store, he drove to their headquarters in an attempt to get a meeting with someone in their app policy department.
"This didn't work for us," he said in his statement, "it only resulted in threats to call the police."
Guess Apple wasn't down.