‘After School’ App Relaunched In Apple Store With New ’17+’ Rating

As the media and school districts were singing Apple’s praises for pulling After School, the controversial mobile application that features message boards for individual schools where students can leave anonymous posts, the creators of the After School app were working on a relaunch. The creators were identified by Re/code as Cory Levy and Michael Callahan. Callahan and Levy own a San Francisco-based social media company called One, according Re/code.

The creators of the After School app say that due to the quick popularity of the After School app, it is not possible to monitor every post. The number of posts often reaches the thousands right after children get out of school. The After School app was downloaded over 100,000 times before it was pulled from iTunes. They made a few changes, and relaunched the application on iTunes swiftly.

One of the changes includes a system that will detect key words that are considered dangerous, such as “gun” and “cut,” but the creators say there isn’t much they can do to monitor the cyberbullying, which was the primary concern of parents and school administrations.

The changes to After School at the relaunch include a feature where students can report content for removal inspection. Since One does not have the staff to monitor all posts for cyberbullying, Callahan said he hopes that children will police themselves. In addition to the self-policing feature, the After School applications’ rating has been changed. It was rated “12+” before the relaunch. It is now rated “17+.”

Rick Todd, the superintendent at Pinckney Community Schools who said this week that a member of his staff was a major player in getting the After School application removed from iTunes, is disappointed in the relaunch of After School. Todd called the changes made for the relaunch “ridiculous given its target audience are high school students,” according to the Livingston Daily.

Michelle Edwards, a spokesperson for Davison Schools, told MLIVE that even with the changes involved in the relaunch, the application is still unacceptable.

“It’s sickening, it really is,” Edwards said.

Cyberbullying is being called a massive problem among children, and allowing the users to remain anonymous exacerbates that problem, school officials say. Cyberbullying, like the content that was found on After School before the relaunch, has been implicated as one cause of the increase in teen suicides, according to an earlier report on the Inquisitr.

Matt Burns, a writer at TechCrunch, isn’t too worried about After School’s relaunch.

“Apple doesn’t let app producers get away with violating its terms of service, especially with displaying offensive material,” Burns assured readers.

Burns writes that if the changes made to After School for its relaunch do not curb the issues that caused its removal, parents, school administers, and cyberbullying victims should be able to count on its permanent removal from iTunes before long.