Controversial Anonymous App After School Has Returned to the App Store

After nearly four months, After School, an anonymous messaging app specifically for high school students, has been reinstated into the App Store, according to COO Cory Levy.

After School was banned from the App Store in December for violating multiple App Store guidelines, including the “personal attacks” and “objectionable content” categories.

Students, who can use After School to post to their high school classmates anonymously, were using the app to bully one another; multiple gun threats were reported in the app’s first month of existence.

Since then, After School has built numerous safety features into the app to try and prevent this kind of behavior.

The most heavy handed of those safety measures is human moderation. Each and every post submitted to the app now has to be approved by a human moderator before anyone else can see it, Levy told Re/code last month.

After School is paying an outside company to do this moderation for them. Before the app was banned from the App Store, students were posting at least once per minute and as much as a thousand times an hour during peak hours, Levy said. Moderating a post per minute may work for now, but if After School continues to grow, it will be interesting to see if its moderation strategy can scale along with it.

Before it was removed from the App Store, After School was having a lot of early success among American teenagers. In its first month, it had more than 100,000 downloads from students in more than 14,000 high schools. Then the app was banned, halting that growth.

But Levy said last month that he wasn’t concerned about losing out on potential users. Students have been emailing and tweeting at him for months asking when it will be back.

“People want what they can’t have,” he said.

You can download the app in the App Store here. There is no Android version right now.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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