Sam Trenholme’s blog
The Tea app: R.I.P.
October 24, 2025
I discuss the Tea app, which has now been pulled from the Apple store.Wholesale slander of men
The Tea app has been pulled from the Apple store. Was it even a good idea to have this app?
This app, a “gossip” app that was designed to “review” men that women may consider dating, has been marketed as a safety app to keep women safe. However, men were not allowed to use the app, and the app was used to spread slander about men which the men were not allowed to see, much less respond to.1 This is very different from, say, Yelp, since the Tea app was talking about men’s personal lives (what a public business does is a matter of public record), and the “reviews” (if you will) of the men were not even visible to the men being “reviewed”.
In some cases men who don’t even talk to girls had lies spread about them on the Tea app.
Earlier this summer, pictures of some Tea app users were leaked online causing those pictures to be widely shared, including in a torrent file. Someone even briefly had a web app up where people could rate pictures of Tea app users. Yes, it was a violation of privacy to do that; on the other hand, the entire purpose of the Tea app has been to violate the privacy of men.
For myself, having had a close friend who was slandered in a similar Facebook group, I can not be neutral about this app being pulled from the Apple store: It harmed a lot of men, innocent men in many cases, and the world, in my opinion, is a better place when we don’t let men be slandered this way.
Apple did the right thing removing this app from their app store. Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Footnote
1: Often times female friends of a guy being slandered would let him know what’s going on