Is AminoApps down, or gone?

Down vs. gone: how to tell in 60 seconds

Four signals separate a real outage from a permanent shutdown. You can check all of them yourself right now.

The app-store row is the fastest and most decisive of the four. Companies do not delist a live product during an outage. Delisting is deliberate, and it is not something you do to a service you intend to bring back this week. If a search of the App Store or Google Play doesn't return the app, you have your answer without checking anything else.

Why down-detector sites are misleading here

Outage-tracking sites are genuinely useful for live services. They're actively confusing for dead ones, and it's worth understanding why so the graphs stop misleading you.

Those sites mostly count user reports. They don't independently probe a server and record whether it answered. So the shape of the graph reflects how many people happened to try the service in a given hour, not whether anything changed.

With a shut-down platform, that produces a distinctive artefact. A video or a Reddit thread reminds thousands of former users that Amino exists; they check; they find it broken; they report it. The graph shows a dramatic spike. Nothing changed on any server. You are looking at a chart of people rediscovering the shutdown, plotted as if it were an incident.

If you want a real answer, use a checker that probes the host from multiple locations and reports the actual response, and read the response rather than the summary word. There's an important difference between “no response at all” and "responds, but the application isn't there", and only the second describes Amino.

Things that won't help (and one that hurts)

Every one of these gets suggested in threads about Amino, and none of them work, because none of them address the actual cause:

• Clearing the app cache or data. Fixes local corruption. The problem isn't local.
• Switching networks, or using a VPN. Fixes region blocks and ISP-level filtering. This isn't either.
• Updating the app. There's no update to fetch from a delisted listing.
• Changing DNS. The domain resolves fine. Resolution was never the issue, see the domain explainer.
• Waiting. The one thing an outage rewards, and the one thing this doesn't.
• Reinstalling. This is the one that actively costs you. Delete the app and you can't reinstall it from the stores, because it isn't there. If your install still opens, keep it, not because it works, but because whatever it still shows you locally is more than you'll have afterwards.

Sideloaded APKs get raised constantly as the workaround. They don't work either, for a reason that has nothing to do with the file: the app is a client, and the servers it talks to aren't answering. The full explanation is here.

What to actually do now

If you were a member, this is mostly about people: work out who you want to keep in touch with and find them elsewhere. Usernames are surprisingly persistent across platforms, and searching for them works more often than you'd think, how to find old Amino friends covers the approach.

If you led a community, the clock matters more than the destination. Communities that scattered are the ones whose leaders waited for clarity; communities that survived are the ones that picked somewhere, announced it loudly on every channel they still had, and ran something worth showing up for in the first week. The destination mattered far less than the speed. Our migration guide has the announcement templates.

And if you just want the background on how a platform this large ended up here, that's why Amino shut down.