While watching last night’s episode of Silicon Valley, my ears quickly perked up when I heard the Pied Piper gang cracking jokes about a Bro app. The idea for the app is brutally simple — It’s not-so-subtle rip-off of the super minimalistic Yo app (which you should be following us on @brobible). The idea is that you “Bro” your Bros and then they “Bro” you back. It’s logo, in Silicon Valley, looks a lot like a two-handed handjob:
I love that the logo for the bro app is basically a handjob pic.twitter.com/VkaNxmMr5f
— Brandon Wenerd (@brandonwenerd) April 20, 2015
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Here’s the thing about the Bro app, though — It really exists. We were pitched about it back in August of this past year:
“I recently came across this app and I think this is one app we all bro’s can use. It’s called ‘the bro app’ it’s like Yo but for Bro’s. Pretty cool, check it out.”
Here’s a basic “about” page on the app and here is a link to its website:
In an interview with Business Insider, the show’s creator Mike Judge says they came up and built their own Bro app for the show, presumably unaware that a Bro app was already in the iTunes app store:
“It’s silly because it’s a nothing app,” Judge explains. “I remember thinking, there was MySpace and Friendster before Facebook and maybe after Yo some others would come along.” (Which has already happened, thanks to Aaron Paul. In fact, it’s been brought to our attention since this story originally went up that there is also a real Bro app.)
“We worked with a bunch of iOS developers and there were some interfaces [of Bro] that were developed for the day we shot,” said “Silicon Valley” co-producer and lead technical consultant, Jonathan Dotan. “So some of the actors had the prototype [in the scene].”
According to HBO, there are no plans to make the Bro app available for the general public.
Boo! If there’s one thing the world needs more of, it’s more one-hit-wonder Bro apps.