If you aren’t living under a rock, you would be well aware of the controversy which sparked after American magazine Variety revealed the details of a lawsuit filed by a former Snap Inc. employee. The lawsuit alleged that Snapchat CEO Evan Thomas Spiegel had made some unpleasant comments like ‘[Snapchat] is just for rich people’. In a user growth meeting which took place in 2015, Spiegel had also expressed that he ‘didn’t want to expand into poor countries like India and Spain’.
And this was just enough to invoke our patriotism. For the past two days, the social media is replete with anti-Snapchat sentiments and campaigns like #BoycottSnapchat and #UninstallSnapchat are trending on Twitter. Most Indian users have already uninstalled the app and the app ratings on Google Play Store and Apple Store have fallen to a single star.
Amid all this chaos, a 27-year-old Mumbai youth Joshua Fernandes has come up with spoof app SlapChat. Fernandes has dedicated the app to Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel and reportedly he came up with the idea of the app after reading about the entire incident on the internet last Sunday.
A still from the app
Now, what does the app do? Remember the mini clips and flash games from the early days of the computer? “The app has a picture of Evan Spiegel and once a user touches the screen, a slap comes flying to Spiegel’s face! I was using Twitter where I read the word SlapChat on the Bombay High Court parody account. I saw something similar on comedian Atul Khatri’s Facebook page. And I thought it would be fun to give the app a try,” Fernandes spoke in an interview with InUth.
Fernandes also added he has no bad feelings for Spiegel and he made the app just for fun. While Spiegel has denied all the allegations made by the Variety magazine, the outrage is far from ending anytime soon.
