Guide
What happened to Amino, what to actually look for in a replacement, and an honest account of which parts of Amino Aminoka rebuilt — and which parts it has not.
Amino launched in 2014 as one app per fandom, merged into a single app holding hundreds of thousands of communities, and became the default home for anime, K-pop, gaming and roleplay groups through the late 2010s. Then it was acquired, the engineering effort behind it thinned out, bug reports stopped being answered, moderation degraded into automated bans that caught long-standing leaders while spam went untouched, and the app was quietly pulled from both app stores. The web client followed.
There was no shutdown notice, no export tool and no archive. That last detail is the one that still stings: communities that had run for six or seven years lost their wikis, their post history and their member lists in a single stroke, with no way to take a copy. If you want the full timeline, we wrote it up in Amino shut down: when, why, and what to use instead.
Most people arriving from Amino evaluate replacements by asking “does it have chat?” That is the wrong first question, because everything has chat. These are the things that actually decide whether a community survives the move:
Aminoka was designed around the Amino model on purpose, so members do not have to relearn anything. Here is the direct mapping, gaps included.
| What you had on Amino | What Aminoka has |
|---|---|
| Communities you browse and join | The same model. Free to create, free to join, browsable through Discover and findable by search. Communities can be open, approval-only, or gated behind a password. |
| A separate profile per community | Personas. Each community carries its own display name, avatar, bio and status, addressed by an opaque public ID that cannot be linked back to your account or matched against a persona elsewhere. |
| The community wall | A featured section and a latest feed. Text posts, image posts, and polls with single or multiple choice answers, all with comments, likes and pinning. |
| Public chatrooms and DMs | Both, plus group chats. Real-time over a persistent connection, with replies, reactions, edits, mentions, images, voice messages, message translation and invite links. |
| Leader / curator hierarchy | Member, curator and leader roles, with a seven-tab moderation panel covering identity, access, channels, rules, members, join requests and bans. |
| Community wikis | Every community has a wiki tab. Character pages published from your OC library appear there as entries. |
| Roleplay chats and character wikis | A full original-character library — portrait, bio, pronouns, species, alignment, stats, traits, abilities, gallery — with collections for grouping a cast, and the ability to equip a character in a chat room so your messages appear under their name and face. This is the part Aminoka built out furthest past Amino. |
| Levels, streaks and reputation | Daily check-ins build a per-community streak that feeds a leaderboard and earns Aminoka Coins. Coins are earn-only — no catalogue, no purchases. |
| Voice chat | Voice calls inside chat rooms, plus recorded voice messages. |
| Screening rooms and public livestreams | Not built. If your community lived around watch parties, this is a real gap. |
For a side-by-side against the other options — Discord, Reddit, Tumblr, Telegram, Mighty Networks and the rest — read the top 10 Amino alternatives. Plenty of communities end up running two platforms, and that is a perfectly reasonable outcome.
The full migration guide has copy-and-paste templates for the announcement post and the first-week schedule.
In every way that matters, yes. The app was removed from the Apple App Store and Google Play, the web client stopped working, and there was no official closure announcement. An old install may still open, but the features that made it worth having do not work.
It depends what you used Amino for. If it was mostly live chat, Discord does that better than anything. If it was mostly threaded discussion, Reddit does. If you want the whole shape — communities with walls, per-community profiles, roles, wikis and chat in one place — Aminoka was built specifically to be that. Our blog has a ranked comparison of ten alternatives that does not pretend we are the right answer for everyone.
No. Amino never had a data export, there is no public API, and the servers are gone. Anyone offering to recover an old community for you is not being straight with you. The realistic path is rebuilding with the roster you can still reach.
Setting up the new space takes under an hour. Moving people takes weeks, and how many arrive is decided almost entirely by how clearly you tell them where you went and whether there is something to do when they get there.
No, and most communities should not. Discord is better at fast chat than anything else on the market. A common and sensible arrangement is Discord for the day-to-day chatter and Aminoka for the things chat is bad at — a durable wall, per-community profiles, character pages, a wiki, and a place newcomers can find you without an invite link.
We cannot promise you a decade — nobody honestly can. What we can tell you is how this one is set up: it is free to run at small scale, it is not carrying an acquisition to service, and it is built and maintained by people who use it. If it ever does wind down you will hear it from us, and you will get your data out first.
Signing in takes about ten seconds, and you can look around Discover before committing to anything. If you would rather see the app screen by screen first, take the product tour, or read more about the platform on the Aminoka home page.
Would rather not use a social login? Sign in with an email code — we mail you a six-digit code, so there is no password to invent or forget.
By continuing you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.