Astrology Apps Disdained by App Stores, People

Today Mashable wrote that the popular astrology app Co-Star has been pulled from the Google Play store for “metadata violations” and the app being “pseudo-science”.

In a similar but much smaller scale, our very own astrology app, Kismet, has been rejected by Apple twice, for the following:

We continue to find that your app primarily features astrology, horoscopes, palm reading, fortune telling or zodiac reports. As such, it duplicates the content and functionality of many other similar apps currently available on the App Store.

While these app features may be useful, informative or entertaining, we simply have enough of these types of apps on the App Store, and they are considered a form of spam.

While Kismet does include some astrology features, it is first and foremost a dating app. We brought this point up to Apple and of course it simply fell on deaf ears, like shouting into the infinite void of the stars.

Ironically, Kismet was allowed into the Google Play store with no fuss.

You can see from our app store promos that this is not just about horoscopes and astrology, this is about meeting people

At this point, I think it’s worth mentioning that when my wife Jenny and I set out to build Kismet, I didn’t know what I was getting into. I knew my sun sign (Cancer), and some basic horoscope stuff, that’s about it. I had been getting familiar with the astrology community on Instagram, which is extremely active and quite awesome and engaging. So when Jen suggested an astrology dating app, I was in.

What I did not realize is how extremely divided our society is on astrology. In fact, those who don’t like it, seem to really not like it.

I found that the social media astrology community was made up of mostly women. They were using memes and horoscopes to discuss everything from a mundane night out, to a recent steamy romance that went awry, to developing strategies on how to best execute over the next few months. Some of it was serious, some of it was tongue-in-cheek, some of it was just for laughs.

What I also found was a distinct lack of men in these spaces.

As I began to develop the app and shop it around to my friend group, the women were overjoyed at the prospect of an astrology dating app. While the men I knew were ambivalent to down right hating it.

Men told me they would never use it, they would be embarrassed to tell their friends about it, they would never date a girl who is into astrology.

But for the most part men said “as long as there are women on there, I’ll join”. And in this divide I think can be found the crux of the recent spat against astrology.

Everywhere I go to talk about our astrology app, or read about astrology in tech, there is no shortage of men coming out to deride it or discuss why it’s fake, pseudo-science, and many other derisive comments.

So it seems to me that as soon as women decide to start carving out a space for themselves, there is no shortage of men running to scream why it should not exist. With the patriarchy as entrenched as it is, it’s no wonder our apps are getting targeted.

What happened to live and let live? And why do these men feel so angry about this astrology emergence? Maybe Co-Star said it best: