How a struggling startup’s app helped Trump reach supporters — and all their contacts
President Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign was powered by a smartphone app that allowed staff to monitor the movements of his millions of supporters and offered intimate access to their social networks.
While the campaign may be winding down, the data strategy is very much alive, and the digital details that the app collected can be put to multiple other uses: to fundraise for the president’s future political ventures, stoke his base or even build an audience for a new media empire.
The app lets Trump’s team communicate directly with the 2.8 million people who downloaded it — more than any other app in a U.S. presidential campaign — and, if they gave permission, with their entire contact list as well.
Once installed, it can track their behavior on the app and in the physical world, push out headlines, fundraise, sell “Make America Great Again” merchandise and sync with mass-texting operations, according to the app’s privacy policy and user interface.
The enterprise software company that built the app is in financial distress and has received key support from the Trump administration and the campaign, according to interviews with former employees, financial filings and court documents.
Phunware Inc., whose stock is trading for pennies, recently agreed to pay Uber $4.5 million as part of a settlement over claims of fraudulent advertising and earlier this year risked being delisted from the Nasdaq. In April, the company, which is based in Austin, Texas, received a $2.9-million loan under the federal coronavirus relief package even as it was developing the Trump campaign app.
A top Trump campaign aide’s firm was used to send mass texts making false claims and urging supporters to rally near vote counting in Philadelphia.
Campaign watchdogs and former employees marvel at how a struggling startup known more for creating apps for hospitals and a Manhattan-based astrologer became a juggernaut in Trump’s reelection bid, facilitating an ongoing data and fundraising effort that threw the company a financial lifeline.
While activity on the app has slowed recently, the enriched data it gathered on Trump’s supporters, which can include everything from their contacts to their IP addresses and their locations, can continue to serve many purposes, said Adav Noti, a former Federal Election Commission attorney now with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center.
Congress and the FEC have not set rules governing how campaigns can use people’s personal data or to whom the campaign can sell its lists, he added.
“You can definitely buy the data and the campaign can sell it to you. The trickier question is how much do you have to pay for it,” Noti said.
As Trump hijacks online innovations that progressives pioneered, Biden keeps stumbling online. The left’s digital experts warn he is losing time to close the gap.
Phunware declined to respond to questions about the app, the company’s financial status, its internal culture or its relationship to the campaign.
“Phunware has absolutely no role in the constitutional processes tied to U.S. elections at any level ... and also has no role in the content created or used by our customers specific to our mobile software or enterprise cloud platform for mobile,” CEO Alan Knitowski said in an email.
The Trump campaign declined to answer questions about possible future uses for the supporter data it collected via digital platforms, including the Phunware app.
“The data [are] owned by the campaign and limited [to] whatever hit their servers,” said a senior Trump campaign official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss campaign specifics.
As Phunware has hit challenging financial times, it has shed employees, clients and investors, 10 of whom agreed to speak to the Associated Press, some on condition of anonymity because they signed nondisclosure agreements or feared retaliation.
Phunware sued its client Uber in 2017, accusing the ride-sharing company of failing to pay its fees, court records show. But after Uber filed suit against Phunware, alleging that the software company committed fraud by, among other things, allowing ads for the ride-sharing app to show up on porn sites, former employees said the startup looked to diversify its revenue stream.
Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s former advisor, told the AP that he brokered a relationship between Phunware staff and Trump’s 2016 campaign digital director, Brad Parscale.
“I thought it had lots of implications for politics so in a subsequent conversation I mentioned it to Brad Parscale,” Rove said. “He said, ‘Interesting,’ and that was it. He never told me he had hired them.”
A tech-focused civil liberties group on Tuesday sued to block President Trump’s executive order that seeks to regulate social media, saying it violates the 1st Amendment and chills speech.
Knitowski said in an email that he built the relationship with the campaign.
“Phunware met the Trump Campaign through me directly after a 1:1 introduction from a Silicon Valley CEO who requested our consideration and participation in an RFP that also had Salesforce as a finalist,” Knitowski said in his statement.
By early 2019, after Phunware went public, former colleagues said Knitowski spoke of wanting to court the Trump campaign. In April of that year, 15% of Phunware’s staff was laid off under “organizational restructuring and cost reductions,” according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing.
In August 2019, there was something new to announce: work with American Made Media Consultants, “otherwise known as the ‘Trump-Pence 2020’ and ‘Keep America Great’ campaign,” Knitowski said in an earnings call.
According to a document filed with Federal Communications Commission two months later, the company’s directors included Trump campaign operations director Sean Dollman and campaign counsel Alex Cannon.
Phunware would later reveal more details about its work on the Trump app, which would include location-based tools and other features to help the campaign crowdsource new users. Plus, there would be a “gamified” loyalty system, where supporters could accumulate points to spend on signed MAGA hats or pose for a picture with Trump.
By September 2019, 18% of the remaining staff was laid off after client Fox Networks Group left, taking a large percentage of Phunware’s sales with them, according to filings.
In April of this year, as coronavirus cases surged, Phunware got a $2.9-million loan from the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program, a relief fund Congress created to help small businesses keep workers employed.
In a recorded interview, Phunware COO Randall Crowder denied that political favoritism netted Phunware the loan.
The following month, Nasdaq notified the company that it could be delisted over its finances. To stay listed, firms must meet standards to reassure investors that they remain a credible company.
SEC records reveal that by July, American Made Media Consultants accounted for one-third of all Phunware’s sales, paying Phunware more than $1.6 million in the first half of 2020.
Michigan’s largest county has reversed course and unanimously certified its presidential election results.
As the pandemic kept people home, Trump’s campaign used the app to acquire new users remotely. By mid-November, the app hit 2.8 million downloads, according to online data provider Apptopia.
That could give the campaign access to tens and possibly hundreds of millions of phone numbers through the app users’ contact lists, enabling the campaign to reach people who didn’t consent to being contacted, experts say.
In an SEC filing last week, Phunware suddenly stopped disclosing its top customers by name. But by matching the accounting figures to past filings, the AP determined that American Made Media Consultants is Phunware’s largest customer, paying Phunware $2.4 million over the first nine months of 2020 — nearly one-third of Phunware’s revenue.
Two former employees concurred with the assessment. The app developer also disclosed sizable debt and expressed “substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.”
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