Did Amino really shut down?

Yes. The Amino app was removed from the Apple App Store first, then from the Google Play Store, and the web client (aminoapps.com) was switched into a permanent maintenance page that never came back. Most users discovered it when push notifications stopped, chat stopped delivering, and the app store listings vanished — there was no official farewell post from the company.

If you can still open an old install of Amino on your phone, most features (chat, posting, login, notifications) won't work. The servers behind the app have been decommissioned in the way MediaLab decommissions products it can't monetize: silently.

When did Amino shut down? (the timeline)

• 2014 — Amino launched as a single-community app, one download per fandom.
• 2017–2018 — Merged into a single mega-app. 100M+ downloads. K-pop, anime, roleplay, gaming communities dominated.
• 2019–2020 — Peak. 300M+ lifetime downloads. The leader / curator hierarchy and full profiles made it sticky.
• 2021 — MediaLab acquires Amino. Layoffs follow within months.
• 2022–2023 — Bug reports go unanswered. Push notifications break. Moderation collapses into aggressive auto-bans.
• 2024 — Amino is pulled from the iOS App Store, then from Google Play. Existing installs keep limping along.
• 2025 — The web app goes into permanent maintenance. The app is effectively dead. Communities migrate to Discord, Reddit, and Amino-style replacements like Aminoka.

Why did Amino shut down?

Two reasons compound. One — the ownership. MediaLab, the company that bought Amino in 2021, has a well-documented pattern: they buy creator products (Whisper, Kik, Genius), strip the engineering team, run them as ad inventory, and let them slowly die. Amino's roadmap froze almost immediately after the acquisition.

Two — the moderation collapse. Once the staff was gone, the auto-moderation system started banning long-time leaders for routine content while spam and scams went untouched. Leaders left. Without leaders, communities went dark. Without active communities, MAU dropped. Without MAU, ad revenue dropped. The math stopped working — so MediaLab pulled the plug rather than rebuild it.

Is Amino gone forever?

From a practical standpoint — yes. The app stores have removed it, the servers are decommissioned, and the company that owns the IP has shown no interest in reviving it. There's no rumored relaunch, no acquirer in talks publicly, no community fork that's reverse-engineered the backend. If you were waiting for it to come back, you're better served by moving on.

Can you recover your old Amino communities?

Not from inside Amino. There's no official export, no archive download, and no API access. The pragmatic path is to rebuild on a new platform with a roster you rally manually — DMs, Discord, Reddit, whatever channel you still have to your members. We wrote a step-by-step Amino community migration guide with templates for the announcement, the "find us here" post, and the first-week onboarding flow.

What's the best replacement for Amino?

It depends what you used Amino for. Discord works if your community was mostly chat. Reddit works if it was mostly posts. Aminoka is the one we built specifically as a like-for-like Amino replacement: communities, full profiles, walls, polls, level/reputation, leader hierarchy, public chats, all on a modern stack that won't be shut down by an absentee owner.

For a wider comparison see our breakdown of the top 10 Amino alternatives or the more opinionated best Amino replacement guide. We also have a deep comparison of Amino vs Discord if you're leaning that way.

Bottom line

Amino is gone. There won't be a comeback. The communities that built years of culture on it are spreading across half a dozen platforms — and the ones that move first, with a clear "we live here now" post and a working alternative, keep their people. The ones that wait lose them to attrition.

If you want the closest replacement, try Aminoka. It's free, it's actively built (we ship updates daily), and the entire structure is intentionally similar to Amino's so your members don't have to relearn anything.