Tea is a "dating safety app" that gained popularity earlier this year. It allowed women to share their dating experiences with men, upload their photos, review them, and flag them as "red" or "green". Although it was very popular among millions of women, it did suffer a couple of breaches in July, leaking user details and direct messages (DMs). Now, Apple has removed Tea from the App Store.
As reported by TechCrunch, Tea"s removal from the App Store is due to the app"s failure to meet Apple"s content moderation and user privacy mandates. Indeed, many people were not happy with the fact that their personal information, often defaming, was uploaded on an app with millions of downloads without their consent. Apple also highlighted the fact that Tea received a lot of negative reviews, including complaints about personal information regarding minors being posted online too.
Apple cited three App Store rules being violated by Tea. The first requires apps with user-generated content (UGC) to have reporting and blocking capabilities, along with moderation that allows removing certain content. The second doesn"t allow sharing someone else"s private information without their consent, and the final one dealt with with apps that receive consistently negative reports and reviews.
Apple says that it asked Tea to fix all of the aforementioned issues, but these demands were not met, leading to the app"s removal. It is interesting to note that rival app TeaOnHer, which serves the exact same purpose but with genders reversed, has also been booted from the storefront for the same reason. According to statistics from third-party analytics service Appfigures, Tea was downloaded 6.1 million times overall and generated a lifetime revenue of $5 million, while TeaOnHer netted 2.2 million downloads without any monetization.
It remains to be seen if both apps will return to the App Store after resolving Apple"s complaints, but it"s highly unlikely given that their operational model can"t work around the fact that they do share private information without consent.