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New app from the makers of Secret sends you mysterious notifications throughout the day

New app from the makers of Secret sends you mysterious notifications throughout the day

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Notifications on your phone usually bring with them some sort of dread — your weather app is telling you it's about to rain, or maybe there's some important email that needs answering. Worst of all, someone might have tagged you in another embarrassing Facebook photo. But Ping, a new mysterious new iOS and Android app from the makers of Secret, is trying to make notifications something to look forward to.

The dead-simple app has no usernames or passwords, and it doesn't ask to look through your address book for friends. Instead, it lets you choose what kind of notifications you want from a seemingly random list. Some are reasonable, like "apps worth downloading" and "trending on Twitter." Others are a bit further afield, like "random thoughts (YMMV)," "is it Friday yet," and "daily fortune cookies." The infrequent notifications offer little more than a sentence of information, and the app itself only lets you view past notifications. It's not yet clear where, exactly, the "pings" are coming from.

Secret CEO David Byttow tells Recode that the app isn't tied to the company's original app in any way. Ping was brought into this world during a weekend hackathon at the company "where the goal was an exercise in simplicity," according to a blog post. The app is definitely simple — now we just need to see if it fares better than Apple's ill-fated social network of the same name.

Update, September 28th, 5:19PM: Added a link to the Android version of the app.