Overview
- Apple removed Tea and TeaOnHer worldwide on October 21 after an excessive volume of user complaints, including reports of minors’ personal information being posted.
- Apple cited violations of App Review Guidelines 1.2, 5.1.2 and 5.6 and said it had warned the developers repeatedly but the problems persisted.
- Tea suffered breaches exposing about 72,000 images, including roughly 3,000 selfies and photo IDs, plus tens of thousands of images from posts, comments and direct messages, leading the company to disable DMs and face a class-action lawsuit.
- Rival TeaOnHer also had security flaws that exposed users’ personal data such as government IDs and selfies, as previously documented by TechCrunch.
- With the iOS removals, copycat “tea” apps have climbed the App Store charts, including Tea on Her & Him – Overheard, which has about 354,000 downloads and recently rose to No. 27 overall.