/ Backstory /
Let's start this article by giving credit where it's due.
In the TV show Curb your Enthusiasm, Larry David - acting as a fictionalized self - is having a feud with Mocha Joe, owner of the eponymous coffee shop.
Larry is getting frustrated with Mocha Joe's wobbly tables and lukewarm coffee that Joe refuses to address.
In order to prove to Joe that he can do better (and of course as an act of pure petty revenge), Larry then decides to open Latte Larry's, his very own coffee shop right next door. He graciously calls it a Spite Store.
/ That awkward feeling /
Nowadays it feels like every single app on earth will attempt to extract rent from their users. While this business model might make sense for apps requiring non-trivial upkeep costs (servers, new features & content etc.), it certainly does not feel as justified for apps implementing some of the most basic concepts.
And if this was not enough, a lot of them will come with the added bonus of either showing you ads, or collecting your (private) data, including sending it to ad-Tech giants such as Meta.
I get it, people need to make money and I'm sure some of the most popular apps got designed with timeless care. Perhaps even by a small team or solo indie developers that need to sustain their livelihood. That's cool with me.
But you know what, sometimes I'm just tired of all these BS subscriptions and disregard for my data. I'm tired of tech being pushed towards enshitification and profit extraction maxxxing.
So instead, I'll just be building a stupid clone of your app. That's my vision for Spite Apps.
/ The Latte Larry's of apps /
From now on, every time I stumble upon a small(ish) problem I personally want to solve, I'll first do a bit of research for an existing app that may solve it, look up the top results, and see if they match any of these criteria:
- Mandatory subscription that feels unjustified
- Paid-upfront price that exceeds what I could produce in a few hours/days of agentic coding
- Does not respect my privacy
If they do, then this is it... I'll just build a clone out of spite.
Ok so we went this far talking about the bar of standards that I'm looking for, but concretely speaking, how would a spite app actually be better than its counterparts?
This brings us to the Spite Apps Playbook™.
1. No Telemetry
Spite apps do not perform any sort of telemetry [*], that's legitimately the only way to not spy on your users.
Growth hackers and big tech will keep telling you that metrics are one of the most important things in your app. No metrics == no ability to measure what is genuinely working or not, where to optimize your conversion rate and so forth.
These arguments are absolutely true in the right context, but given the much smaller problem space of a spite app, the decision criteria is much simpler: is the app solving my problem(s)? And to not be totally selfish, I usually incorporate a feedback email link directly inside the app, allowing users to reach out if they have questions or suggestions.
Does your TODO LIST app really need to know what buttons people pressed, what color should be used for my button and how many pixels from the top to place the title? -- No it doesn't.
"But what about anonymous telemetry aggregates? Surely that's a good tradeoff?"
Honest answer: I could see value here, but once again the goal here is to keep things very simple and - as mentioned earlier - the only way to guarantee privacy is to collect nothing. You'd be surprised by how many ways what on the surface appears as private data is actually... not that private.
A couple examples:
- perhaps you forgot to censor sensitive data such as a first name / last name or social security numbers, or even more fun, a user inputs sensitive data in a field that was not meant to be used as such. Congratulations, you just obtained sensitive data.
- perhaps your user location happens to be in a remote place where said user is statistically likely to be the only person living there. Congratulations, you effectively know what that specific person is doing.
2. I don't own your data
Spite apps use on-device storage and/or free hosting solutions that respect your privacy (for example, iCloud). This also means no user account beyond logging in with your Apple ID.
When it comes to serving / hosting User Generated Content (UGC), I've personally resorted to the following approaches:
- Facilitate importing / sharing UGC directly from the app, let users share content on medium of choice (social media, Discord, Google Drive, email, iMessage etc.)
- Crowd-source the UGC through GitHub or some equivalent. This allows people to help you author some of the data while keeping the state mostly read-only and reduce bad actors through peer reviews
3. No ads
Showing ads in your app is always going to result in making your app a worse experience. Period.
Ads will add nothing but unwanted noise and frustration. You lose control of what will be presented to your user, and overall there's the universal stigma of ad-powered freemium apps feeling cheap and lower quality.
4. Free with optional tipping
So far I've made all of my Spite apps completely free with the option to do a one-time tip payment. The tip unlocks nothing except some fun confettis that get thrown on your screen.
THERE IT IS, LOOK AT THE HYPOCRISY, HE'S ACTUALLY ASKING FOR MONEY I KNEW IT!
Yep that's true, but let me tell you something else, the optional in-app tip has barely brought me enough to pay for an Apple Developer subscription ($100).
What it did bring me however was a way to solve my problems without having to pay for stupid subscriptions nor having my privacy violated. There were also plenty of users who took the time to write to me saying thank you for building a free and non-creepy alternative, and honestly that felt great!
/ Closing Thoughts /
"But your apps are not as good as the paid ones"
That's ok with me, you can either send me an email for feedback and feature requests, download the app from a competitor or hey you know what? MAKE YOUR OWN SPITE APP OF MY SPITE APP!
After all, even Latte Larry's did not end up so well...
Finally, here comes the indie dev shameless plug for the couple spite apps that I built in the past year:
Spaced. ~ the tinder-style flash cards app optimized for human memorisation
AppList. ~ the minimalist app launcher for your iPhone
*telemetry: All telemetry? Not quite! Turns out there's an irreducible
group of logs that the Roman empire has been unable to defeat. Apps on the
Apple App Store come with basic telemetry such as app launches, retention
metrics and crashes. I don't personally fight against these but users can
still opt-out.