Mashable.com
At an age when many of his contemporaries are logging on to Snapchat for the first time, 13-year-old Daniel Singer has created his own messaging app, which hit iTunes on Wednesday.
Backdoor is billed as a “secret messaging” app. The premise: You can send and receive messages, but you don’t know who they are from. There are even “clues” to help you figure it out. The app has a U.S. patent and three additional pending patents relating to “anonymous communications between users.”
Singer, who lives in Los Angeles, describes Backdoor as a way to “anonymously message your friends and have conversations anonymously with some transparency.” While there are obvious uses for such an app — flirting, practical jokes — Singer says that “the possibilities are endless.”
The same could be said for Singer, who was also the co-creator of YouTell, a site with 2 million members that lets you solicit anonymous feedback about yourself from your Facebook friends and answer questions like “Does my breath smell?” Singer, the son of movie producer Uri Singer, started messing around with website creation two years ago. At this point, Singer knows HTML, CSS and “a bit of Ruby” and is learning to code for iOS. He teamed up with about 10 developers — adult developers — for YouTell.
Singer hopes to have a career in tech someday. That day may not be so far off since the entry age keeps dropping. Singer says there’s another kid in his school with an app on iTunes. There are also other teens with apps out there including James Allen, who was 15 when his SaveGloopapp hit iTunes and Julian Alvarez, whose WidgeTabs app hit when he was 16. Then there’s Nick D’Aloisio, whose Summly app was acquired by Yahoo for $30 million back in March when he was 17.
Singer is certainly aware of D’Aloisio, but isn’t waiting around for Marissa Mayer to call with an offer. He says he likes making apps just for the fun of it, for now at least. “I just like making [apps] and technology,” he says. “If you can influence people with it in some way then that’s great.”