If ignoring your parents’ “Where are you??”/”How was class?”/”Don’t drink too much!!!” texts is standard practice for you, you will want to keep this new app as far from their worried eyes as possible.
A product manager in the U.K. invented ReplyASAP in response to his 13-year-old’s radio silence on his phone, and it is no doubt coming for unsuspecting teens everywhere.
“There’s been a few occasions where I’ve tried and tried and still nothing,” Nick Herbert, the app’s inventor, explained to ABC News. “It’s generally a culmination of, how can I get in contact with him if I need to?”
Herbert’s son Ben always had a his phone on silent, and his father had to resort to “Find My iPhone” to verify his son’s safety.
ReplyASAP solves this by sounding an alarm when a parent has sent a text even if their child’s phone is on silent, and showing the sender when their text has been read, much like forced read receipts. Then, the alarm will not turn off until the child presses one of several button options acknowledging that they have seen the message — they can snooze the message, or press “cancel,” which will shut off the alarm but send back an alert saying which button was pushed. Messages can also be scheduled out.
“Just knowing I have a means of contacting him if I need to…it gives you that reassurance,” Herbert continued.
ReplyASAP is free to download, and has already amassed 6,800 downloads globally. It is only available for Android, so iPhone kids are still safe…for now.