Investors in Bending Spoons include musician The Weekend, tennis player Andre Agassi, movie star Bradley Cooper, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and director/actor Taika Waititi, among many other famous people: <a href="https://bendingspoons.com/people" rel="nofollow">https://bendingspoons.com/people</a> (scroll to the bottom to see all names).<p>I wonder if any of these illustrious backers are aware of the <i>true</i> business model of Bending Spoons, which can only be described as <i>scammy</i>:<p>1. Buy apps that have loyal users.<p>2. Fire all or most of the employees.<p>3. Update the apps with the most possibly intrusive adware, to milk user data for cash, earning a nice return.<p>Most users will thoughtlessly tap "OK" when asked to agree to the barrage of new permissions requested by the updated apps.<p>The company does other things too, but this is its main business.
They recently acquired Meetup as well [1]. This doesn't bode well for its future.<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953242">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38953242</a>
Why is an adware company allowed to advertise its app with the name of a government organization ("NOAA Weather Radar")? Since they can just sell the app, I assume it's not them writing it for the government on contract.
If you read their Wikipedia page [1] they sound like an Italian Saint. A lot about the various awards they have gotten and other "charitable" activities.<p>But reading the comments here, I get another impression of the company.<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons</a>
They did the same recently with Filmic [0], of the Filmic Pro iOS Camera app.<p>I guess this is what the exact opposite of acqui-hire looks like. Acquire only for the app's customers, and their currently ongoing subscriptions, and nothing else.<p>Does anyone know if they maintain these apps well over time, or they just rot?<p>[0] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38502586">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38502586</a>
Is there an app that monitors your apps to see if any have been sold to such unethical companies to alert you to delete your accounts with those apps?<p>That would seem like a useful app.<p>Frankly Apple and Alphabet should offer such a service but I don't have much confidence that they will.
i'm not sure i quite understand the situation. is the implication that bending spoons is some kind of private equity firm but for apps that will suck the soul out of these 17 apps? i haven't heard of this company before but browsing their site at least the marketing speak points towards it not being the case... could someone explain?
Calling your company "Bending Spoons" is like calling it "Stealing Chickens" (Context: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_bending</a>)
Bending Spoons also bough Evernote a while ago. Pretty much doubled the price.<p>With that I thought they could go stuff themselves and went to unsubscribe, but they offered a drastic discount if I didn't. So they managed to keep me for another year. :/<p>But if they don't get their Python SDK in order soon I might drop them anyway.
20 employees per app? I'll never minimize the amount of work it takes to create software, but even so, that seems like a lot. Moreso when you consider how many employees' skills could be applied to multiple apps.
Bending Spoons is a european company, and one of their major advantages is that salaries in europe are lower, obviously they need to fire the american employees of any company they buy to play that out.
Obviously sucks to be one of those 330 employees, but I wonder if we really need all these junk apps that just harvest user data. Hopefully they can get work doing something fulfilling.<p>Every time a data harvester moves operations to Europe for cheaper labor, it seems like a game of Russian roulette. When will the day come that the EU drives Bending Spoons out of existence?<p>The US should adopt intent nationalistic laws against international businesses collecting American’s data. Not because of National Security (but that’s what the politicians can say) but simply because Americans are the most valuable markets and it’ll drive many of these companies out of business, and generally disrupt the market.