Good2Go, an app developed by a small team consisting of senior Nick Allman and senior Christian Nardini, was recently pulled off the Apple App store, following a national and global discussion of the app and sexual assault.

The app itself was created by Nick Allman alongside family and friends as a way to address the growing issue of sexual assault on campuses across the country.

“It’s been a journey,” Allman said. “This was just an idea that I had with my family; we identified a problem and we thought we had come up with a creative solution to that problem.”

As addressed in the Oct. 3 article, “Good2Go app addresses sexual assault issues,” the app aimed to prevent sexual assault and to foster better communication using a simple set of questions to engage both parties by entering their level of sobriety and confirming consent with one another.

Following the app’s release to the Apple Store, various news and media outlets began to address this issue, something that Allman notes grew into something larger than he and the team had anticipated.

“We kind of lost control of it to tell you the truth,” Allman said. “When this story went viral, we couldn’t handle everything.”

The Good2Go team, consisting of various students around the country and friends and family of Allman, found the large response to the app overwhelming, something that was difficult to handle.

“Our team consisted of me, my parents, my mom the spokesperson, some college kids, some concerned citizens and family friends,” Allman said. “It was a really small team, only about 20 of us, and we couldn’t address all of it.”

After being added to the app store, the app brought about various conversations on sexual assault and the app itself. Media outlets from the Washington Post, Yahoo Tech and Business Inside joined in on the conversation, raising criticisms of the app or praising its goals. Many of these criticisms revolved around the practicality of the app or the fact that the company and app were storing data.

“One of the biggest criticisms of the original version of the app was the data capture that made a lot of people uncomfortable,” Allman said. “The next version of the app will not have any kind of record keeping in the Cloud. People didn’t want that and we are willing to listen to that.”

After being available for free on the Apple store for a brief period, the Good2Go team received a call from Apple saying that the app had been removed from the site, citing section 16.1 of their App Store Review Guidelines. Section 16 covers objectionable content, with 16.1 stating “Apps that present exceptionally objectionable or crude content will be rejected.”

However, as Lee Ann Allman, president of Good2Go and mother of Nick Allman, stated to Slate’s Amanda Hess, “they did say it was not deemed to be crude.”

Allman was surprised by the Apple takedown stating that he was shocked to hear the news.

“We were surprised when we heard this, we didn’t think there was anything excessively objectionable about our app. Yes, if you looked online there were people who had concerns or criticisms, but our group was too small to respond to all of those,” Allman said.

Despite the takedown, Allman and the Good2Go team remain positive about the future of the app and are planning to re-evaluate it upon making a new version in the near future.

“We decided that we’re not going to give up,” Allman said. “We feel we have done a great job bringing focus to this issue, and  if anything, this app at least got people talking about sexual assault and affirmative consent and that’s something we will always be proud of.”

Regaining the new version, ideas are currently being generated, and the team hopes to involve many others as well, eventually getting the app back into the Apple store.

“Moving forward, we are in the process of restructuring the app and are taking into account some criticism that were given to us,” Allman said. “We are really going to try and rebuild the app in a way where it is a lot better””more educational. Although I’m not ruling out hat there won’t be elements of practicality built into it as well.”

Alongside changes to the app itself, a restructuring of their website, Good2GoApp.com is also in the works, including a public forum where people can share ideas over the app and over sexual assault.

“We are going to include for the first time an open forum that anyone can log onto and post on and we want to make the forum as a way for anybody who has an idea about something they would like to see in the next version of the app to be able to post and express their ideas,” Allman said.

Allman hopes the forum will allow for more ideas as the group works towards the next iteration of the app, stating how, although a small team, by including everyone, they can turn it into a larger project.

“At this point the app has gotten so much media attention that I don’t feel that the small group of us can handle it being our project so we want to turn it into everybody’s project.”