[Mobile Apps] How a horde of Jeremy Renners shut down the official Jeremy Renner app

This is a repost. I am not the original author (see disclaimer at the bottom).

Jeremy Renner. The actor, the artist, the influencer, the celebrity sensation, the legend. From the outside, he is mostly known as Hawkeye from the Marvel MCU movies, but on the inside, he is Jeremy Renner.

Jokes aside, Jeremy Renner is quite a respected actor who is also really successful, getting tons of recognition and even getting multiple Academy Award nominations. It is why when he recently got into a snow plowing accident which left him in critical condition, many were concerned for him (recently he updated that he is now okay I am genuinely glad he is). But even after this awful injury, all that people can talk about is the thing that has been haunting Jeremy Renner’s career for the past half a decade: The Jeremy Renner app. Designed to be an app to get Jeremy Renner more in touch with his adoring fans, it only took a week to turn into a massive laughing stock that quickly shut down. So how did the Jeremy Renner app start and how did it end so quickly?

There is no escape from EscapeX

Before we can talk about the Jeremy app, we need to talk about the people who made it first: the company EscapeX. The company was founded in 2014 and the year after was able to raise over 18 million dollars in funding. They put that money to good use as they started racking up celebrity deals all over the world, most notably famous Bollywood stars. They would then make a special apps that were basically social media sites entirely dedicated to the stars the apps were named after. They had quite some success, as they reported that in 2018 they got 5.5 million dollars in revenue.

While their foot was mostly in Asian markets, they also had some notable western names they had made official apps for, like

• Akon

• Chris D’Elia

• Dita Von Teese

• Bob Marley (yes this is real)

• The Backpack Kid (yes also very real)

• And ofcourse, the man, Jeremy Renner

The inner workings of Jeremy Renner

The official Jeremy Renner app launched in March 2017. So how did this app work?

Well, when you opened the app and after an exclusive video of Jeremy Renner explaining what the app was about, you would find Instagram but everything revolved around Jeremy Renner. All of the pictures were posted by Jeremy Renner, the posts you could reply to were that of Jeremy Renner, and you could pay Jeremy Renner money- wait what? Yes, the Jeremy Renner app had in-app purchases were you could buy stars and use those stars to boost your comment under Jeremy Renner posts and when you got enough starts to boost your comment into the top 3 you may could get a reply from Jeremy Renner.

Yep, the app was that simple: Replying to Jeremy Renner until maybe at some point in your life Jeremy Renner would acknowledge you. If this app sounds pretty lazy, it gets even lazier when you realise the Jeremy Renner app was just literally Jeremy Renner’s Instagram page. Every post Jeremy Renner made on Instagram he also posted on the Jeremy Renner app. He even copied the Instagram captions which created some awkward posts when he used hashtags or @’s people in posts even though the Jeremy Renner app had no hashtag or @ function. The Jeremy Renner app did include some exclusive Jeremy Renner content.. but almost all of it was related to his music career. Some might then say that the Jeremy Renner app was used to promote his music but my middle name is Some so yeah Jeremy Renner definitely used the Jeremy Renner app the most to promote his music.

While the existence of this app was absurd and the inner working even more absurd, the app was quite a success and it got many fans religiously using the app. There was an actual community on the Jeremy Renner app, with memes, events and giveaways. There were dramas about censorship and contest rigging which are too big to go into now, but overall the app continued to work smoothly for two years… until August 2019.

The One-Two Punch

While it is quite difficult to pin down where it all went wrong, I have pinpointed the two things that one-two punched the Jeremy Renner app into chaos.

The first punch was this comedic tweet. While the tweet itself didn’t catch a lot of attention, it did caught the attention of the youtuber Danny Gonzallez, who a few days later made a collab with Drew Gooden exploring the Jeremy Renner app. As you can see, the video was quite popular, and it exposed a lot of people to the Jeremy Renner app.

The first punch got the manpower, but the second punch gave the tools. On August 20th 2019, Jeremy Renner posted a picture with the caption “Have a rockin weekend everyone!!! What’s the plan ??? “. Comedian Stevan Heck then posted a honest comment:

I will be looking at porno on my computer

While there was an expected backlash from loyal Jeremy Renner fans and an expected ban, Stefan Heck did realise something: everyone who commented on the post got notifications from his comment, and the notification of the Jeremy Renner app was constructed that it looked like Jeremy Renner sent that porno comment. After Stevan Heck was banned from the app, he came the next day back on an account called JeremyRennerPornoTruth where he posted a quote from Ai Weiwei before he got quickly banned again. He posted his experience on both his his twitter and on an article he wrote.

An update Stevan added to the article says everything what happened after:

Update (Sept. 4, 5:58 p.m. ET): Oh no.

All hell breaks loose

It started out calm, with a few accounts changing their names like “Jeremy Renner’s Swedish Dog” or “Italian Jeremy Renner”, but quickly it spiraled out of control. So many people were flooding in the Jeremy Renner app with accounts impersonating celebrities. From Steve Jobs to OJ Simpson to Jeffrey Epstein to Jar Jar Binks to, ofcourse, Jerermy Renner himself. These impersonation accounts started spamming comments, memes and everything you would expect a troll raid to do. It got to the point that the earnest users did not even know which Jeremy Renner account was the real Jeremy Renner. The moderators of the Jeremy Renner app tried to put out the flames but the Jeremy Renners were too strong. Nothing could stop the horde of Jeremy Renners.

And that point Jeremy Renner, the real one, had enough. On september 4th, Jeremy Renner made one final post on the Jeremy Renner app.

The app has jumped the shark. Literally. Due to clever individuals that were able to manipulate ways to impersonate me and others within the app I have asked ESCAPEX, the company the runs this app to shut it down immediately and refund anyone who has purchased any stars over the last 90 days.

The Jeremy Renner app shut down shortly after that.

The Aftermath

After the Jeremy Renner app shut down and the countless articles were made, Jeremy Renner moved on to focus posting on his regular social media. Other than that, he continued being Jeremy Renner. EscapeX on the other hand met a worse fate. After the Jeremy Renner app shut down, they pretty much fell off the face of earth. All of their celebrity apps shut down (yes, even the Backpack kid app), all their socials haven’t updated since 2019 and their website is defunct. It is safe to assume that they won’t be coming back.

To most, the Jeremy Renner app is nothing more than a punchline. What was meant to be a new way for huge celebrities to interact with their fans became a joke that couldn’t handle its own scrutiny. Some still defend the Jeremy Renner app and a few even have fond memories of it, but today it is a funny curiosity that once in a moon someone goes “Hey, remember when Jeremy Renner had an app?”

Also, this post contains 60 Jeremy Renners.

Disclaimer

This is a repost from reddit. I really missed this sub so I decided to post some top articles from time to time until hopefully one day this community will be large enough to produce its own content.

Read the original here