The co-founder of Secret has left the company due to a strategy change

The increased demand for anonymous messaging and social apps has given birth to many interesting services, such as Secret. While Secret started off as an aesthetically pleasing image-centric app, it has undergone a redesign that emulates the simplistic text-based layout of its more popular competitor: Yik Yak. This change in focus from design to functionality has prompted co-founder Chrys Bader-Wechseler to leave the company for strategic reasons. 

One year after founding anonymish app Secret with fellow Googler David Byttow, Chrys Bader-Wechseler is leaving the company on amicable terms. He cites that Secret isn’t about design and curation as much now since it redesigned recently, dropping the artful photo squares with overlaid text in favor of a sterile text feed that looks just like competitor Yik Yak. And here you can see how it used to look. Users could choose photos or colors with different textures as the background for their text secrets. This made Secret more visually compelling, but harder to rapidly browse, hence the redesign. Bader-Wechseler tells me “I have a tremendous amount of respect for David and we both believe this is right for the next chapter of the product.”