Chelsea Handler’s New App Is Exactly What Your Phone Needs

You're on the Tinder date from hell and you need to get out, stat. You text your friend real fast, hoping she can call with some emergency, but...where is she? It's been three minutes, how has she not seen your text? With Chelsea Handler's new app, Chelsea Handler: Gotta Go you can never, ever be stuck in that situation again. Gotta Go is an extremely simple app with an extremely simple premise: getting you out of sticky social predicaments. Open the app and with two taps, you can have a rescue text or phone call delivered to your phone at a preset time. You can gracefully leave your date (or office party, or any social function you need escaping from) with a bona fide excuse. Can we travel back in time and have this app five years ago? Gotta Go opens with each excuse in a colored square, identified by an emoji. There's a dog excuse which sends you a text from "your BFF" saying, "Have you seen Rex? I think he got loose." A minute later, it'll follow up with a second text: "I searched everywhere, come home and help me look!" Another option is a phone icon that rescues you with a phone call that needs answering. The presets default to delivering their faux messages 30 minutes after you've hit "Activate" (a good amount of time so your sudden departure doesn't look fishy). Each of these preset excuses is customizable, from who "sent" the message, to what it says, the timing of the message, and timing of follow-up calls or messages. And you can create your own, too. Being a cat owner, I created one from a fake roommate saying my cat had escaped out the front door. You can get as creative or as realistic as you want — another preset is a text that says your BFF was abducted by aliens. Of course, you could always just task an actual friend with sending a message or calling you, but Gotta Go comes in handy if your friends are already busy or you just don't want to disrupt their time. The app is also designed really well — pressing one of the big, preset squares in the app is far quicker than tapping out an actual message. If you ever feel like a damsel in distress, you can use Chelsea Handler: Gotta Go to rescue yourself. The app is available now for free on iOS.