Sarahah

Sarahah (Arabic: صراحة, romanized: ṣarāḥa) was a Saudi Arabian social networking service for providing constructive feedback. In Arabic, sarahah means "frankness" or "honesty".

Sarahah allowed people to text messages to others and the person reading that could then reply anonymously. Initially, it was meant for workers to compliment their bosses. Spam was frequent, sent by third-party apps claiming to be able to reveal the usernames of anonymous senders.

History

It was created by Zain-Alabdin Tawfiq at the end of 2016 and reached a sudden worldwide success by mid-2017. This growth is considered to be deeply related with the release of a Snapchat update that allowed people to share URLs on their snaps.

It was released on the US Apple App Store on 13 June 2017, and also had users in several other countries including Canada, India, and Lebanon. An update was released by Snapchat on July 5. Within two weeks, it was at the number 1 position. The rise was also seen in a Google Trends report.

On 26 August 2017, it was reported that the Sarahah mobile app quietly uploads the user's address book to its web servers.

On 12 January 2018, Katrina Collins, after friends of her 13-year-old daughter sent her abusive messages, started a petition to have the app banned. The petition gained nearly 470,000 supporters. Both Apple and Google had removed the app from their stores.

In 2019, Sarahah launched a iOS app called Enoff (pronounced “enough”) which was aimed at employee activism and unfair practices.

On 15 December 2021, Zain-Alabdin Tawfiq announced via Twitter:

"...I regret to share with you that we're shutting down the Sarahah platform
Thank you for helping us achieve unprecedented growth and making us proud, for your support and patience
I hope to see you again..."

This was retweeted by Sarahah's Twitter account.