This App Lets You Text a Girl Named Samantha

Samantha is a girl who gives advice and opinion from a girl's point of view. Want someone's opinion but don't want to ask your friends? Want to ask someone before asking friends? Can't make decisions? Samantha is there for you!

There's some ambiguity to the App Store description of the Samantha app. Is "Samantha" the name of the service, a character within it, an actual person, or a combination of all three?

Named for the OS heroine of Spike Jonze's Her, Samantha was designed with a single function: Text Samantha, and sometimes she'll reply. There are occasional status updates, many of them announcements of when Samantha will be back online texting, and there are a couple of rules to observe—"Don't fall in love with Samantha" is coyly listed as rule 1—but anything goes as long as you're polite. And you should be, because otherwise Samantha will stop talking to you, and the app will be entirely useless.

Samantha follows Ethan, an app that was built to the same model. Quite literally a sister product (Samantha, we are told, is the sister of Ethan Gliechtenstein, designer of the original app, and is real, and lives in Brooklyn), the app fuses tech minimalism with unruly humanity. You can use Samantha as an outsourced opinion, a kind of smartphone Magic 8 Ball. You can run ideas by her, ask for her verdict on day-to-day problems and ethical dilemmas. You can chat to her when you're bored.

My own experience of the Samantha app is slightly awkward. Knowing she's hopping between hundreds, maybe thousands of conversations, I feel pressure to keep her interested. I ask her what life has been like so far as a human-app hybrid. She replies saying that "It's chill."

I suspect Samantha's app is targeted more at male users, and I wonder about whether or not she is real: as designer of the apps, Gliechtenstein's email address appears at the bottom of both the Ethan and Samantha web pages. I contacted him for an interview, and he offered to also relay my questions to his sister.

The text-app format has been dismissed by some as a "dumb" joke, but the two apps can also be seen as a response to increasingly outlandish and personally invasive technology. Over email, I asked Gliechtenstein if his creation had a philosophical purpose, but he shrugged the question off. "I just built it because I had the idea one night, and wanted to see what would happen. And most people I showed it to thought it was the craziest idea ever, and the best app they'd ever tried. So I knew there was something there."

Specific almost to the point of parody, Samantha and Ethan offer something rare in the App Store: absolute simplicity. The apps take users back to a simpler time, one of Nokia 3210s and polyphonic ringtones, when texting was the main mode of communication.

Fittingly, Ethan was originally conceived of as a way to simplify personal correspondence: bypassing texts, tweets and Facebook messages, Gliechtenstein created it as a way for his friends to reach him. Since then it has transcended the personal, perhaps even the human. "We are playing a certain type of persona through the apps," he admitted. "An imaginary friend if you will. That's why we never give away our identities; showing them our real life would be like watching Stephen Colbert out of character. No one wants to see that."

Gliechtenstein would not reveal many details about himself in the name of preserving this mystery, though he is listed on Product Hunt as also the creator of the RubCam app, which lets you take photos by rubbing your phone screen.

I noticed his phrasing—"Our real life"? Rule 8 of the app forbids questioning this: "Don't ask Samantha if she's real." When asked, Gliechtenstein stuck with the line he described the Samantha app with in a comment on Product Hunt: "Yes, Samantha is real. She's an actual girl who works in the music industry and lives in Brooklyn," and added, "'Are you real?' is one of the most frequently asked lame questions on the app!" Still, it's hard to shake my suspicions: conversation becomes a social game with these human apps, one in which you level up every time you find out a bit more about the person you're talking to.

Samantha, if she is real, is treating the launch as an experiment. "I'm not quite sure how to block people from the app," she wrote in the email apparently relayed to me through her brother, "but it's been really interesting hearing stories from people all over the world. One time I talked to this guy from Turkey about the texture of poops for almost an hour."

Give or take the odd poop conversation, people have been polite. Ethan and Samantha leave conversations whenever they choose, making users accountable for their behavior. Ethan noted how users inherently know not to send Samantha dick pics or rude questions. "If they fuck up then they've just lost their only friend on the network, and the value of the app becomes zero. This dynamic brings out the best in people."

But to be a human app costs energy and time. "In the beginning everyone was very nice and fair," Samantha wrote, "but I think because of how popular the app has gotten, everyone is getting a bit more needy and snappy when I don't respond right away." Ethan has developed a schedule: "In the beginning I texted for two days straight while barely sleeping, and it was too much. Now I carve out a couple of hours per day to commit to texting, normally between 10pm and midnight eastern time."

It's a strange dilemma: Is Ethan's job to talk to others, to work on developing his app further, or to just be Ethan day in and day out? And how can it conceivably scale? Ethan responds, "There's this famous line by Paul Graham from Y Combinator. He says 'Do things that don't scale.' I don't think anything can ever top Ethan when it comes to following this advice."

He views the apps as an experiment, one which will soon be available to anyone via the "Ethan Platform," which will allow users to create similar personal apps. At the end of Ethan and Samantha's web pages there's currently a section for submitting ideas. The time will soon arrive where "the startup of you" will be a literal reality. "It's coming very soon," said Gliechtenstein. "There are some more Ethan apps in the pipeline, and I plan to make it more widely available by launching the website soon. Already thousands of people have signed up for beta."

I asked Gliechtenstein if he intended to keep texting people on his original app. "Forever," he said. "Till death do us part." It will be interesting to watch: perhaps Ethan will be the first antisocial media celebrity, known to thousands of people but only in personal exchanges, rather than in public.

"I see it as an evolution," Ethan said. "People have always imagined how human beings will evolve into cyborgs by attaching enhanced artificial parts to our body, but I see Ethan and Samantha as the opposite direction. We're injecting human consciousness into a machine, which then can be transmitted to the rest of the world."

They offer something retrogressive and oddly forward-thinking all at once: a product as unique as the people–or person–who created it.