Sarahah

» see sarahah.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

sarahah was a teenager app. by the time it went viral in july 2017 i was 33, a computer engineer in ankara, and the snapchat link layer it rode on was a high-school medium i had aged out of. i was on the other side of that demographic line, and the app barely registered for me as anything more than a news item that kept moving up the trending list.

the product itself was simple. you set up a sarahah page, posted the link to your snapchat or instagram, and waited for anonymous messages to arrive in a box. the name means honesty in arabic, and the founder zain-alabdin tawfiq built it in saudi arabia in november 2016 as a workplace-feedback tool. it leaked into the high-school market the way every anonymous-feedback tool ever has, and by mid-2017 it sat at the top of the app store in the us and most of europe. tawfiq claimed 300 million registered accounts.

then the bullying. a mother in australia started a petition after her thirteen-year-old daughter received abusive messages, and apple and google pulled the app from both stores in february 2018. august 2017 had already burned the brand once: the app was caught quietly uploading every contact in your address book to its servers. the combination flattened it. tawfiq kept the domain online for three more years and then announced the final shutdown on twitter on 15 december 2021.

~ the dossier ~

~ the day it died ~

tawfiq posted on twitter on 15 december 2021 announcing sarahah.com would close. the iOS and android builds had been gone since february 2018, so the shutdown was the final removal of the web interface. in january 2019 he had already pivoted to a workplace-feedback app called enoff, and by 2021 sarahah was a domain holding a single login form for a product nobody could install.

the domain has since become a quiz site under a separate corporate entity, in the liquid-audio-post-2003 pattern: the brand kept walking under different hands.

~ what got buried with it ~

the anonymous-feedback category never recovered after sarahah. it had been tried with formspring and ask.fm, and yik yak ran its own version a year before. sarahah was the round that finally got app store policy attention at scale. secret app was already dead by then and whisper was scaling back. the category went into a long freeze after sarahah's flameout.

~ the funny part ~

the most viral consumer product saudi arabia has shipped, by accounts created, was an anonymous teen bully box. the founder built it for office reviews and watched it become the snapchat add-on that shipped harassment between thirteen-year-olds in english-speaking suburbs. then he turned the brand into a quiz site and walked away.

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