Hooked is a mobile fiction app, built by 📝Telepathic, Inc. and launched in 2015, that presents stories as text-message threads — the reader taps through a conversation as though scrolling someone else's chat history.

The format was the product. By rendering fiction in the interface people already stared at all day, and metering it one tap at a time, Hooked converted reading into the same compulsive rhythm as messaging, and found an audience among teenagers who were not otherwise reading fiction on phones. The company raised more than $6 million after its 2014 founding and assembled a conspicuously promotable cap table — 📝Snoop Dogg, Ashton Kutcher, Mariah Carey, Jamie Foxx, and LeBron James among the backers. Its first feature-length story, "Dark Matter," launched on 📝Snapchat in 2018, and the company has claimed more than 100 million readers across the app and that channel. It defined chat fiction as a category and drew direct competitors including Yarn and Wattpad's Tap. The app has since broadened past pure chat transcripts into tap-through episodes with illustrated, manga-influenced art — the usual trajectory for a format-native product once the novelty of the format stops carrying it.