Talkie / Talkie Lab
Talkie / Talkie Lab, character chat (MiniMax), is filed in the graveyard's exile wing. Cause of death: Serial store trouble: pulled from the US App Store in December 2024 for unexplained "technical reasons", back in 2025 rebadged as Talkie Lab, then gone from Google Play in late April 2026 with no public explanation, and back there by September.
- Cause of death
- Serial store trouble: pulled from the US App Store in December 2024 for unexplained "technical reasons", back in 2025 rebadged as Talkie Lab, then gone from Google Play in late April 2026 with no public explanation, and back there by September.
- Tracker profile
- full data & change history →
“Not dead — deported. Twice.”
The obituary
Talkie, built by Chinese AI company MiniMax, spent 2024 as one of the most-downloaded AI apps in the United States — a character-chat platform that outran most of its Western competitors on polish and character variety. It is alive, tracked in our database, and has never announced a shutdown. It resides here because it keeps getting deported.
Exile one: in December 2024, Talkie vanished from the US App Store for what MiniMax called "technical reasons", an explanation nobody accepted at face value amid the scrutiny of Chinese-owned apps. iPhone users who already had it kept it; everyone else lost the door. It came back rebadged as Talkie Lab (first released February 11, 2025, seller SUBSUP PTE. LTD.). Exile two: in late April 2026, Talkie disappeared from Google Play; users on r/TalkieOfficial reported it gone on April 28, and existing installs kept working. Talkie never said why in public. By September 2026 it was listed on Google Play in the US again, as "Talkie: Creative AI Community".
Exile Row exists because the stores are a mortality vector all their own. An app can be healthy — profitable, popular, actively developed — and still lose its body twice in eighteen months because a platform gatekeeper changed its mind. Talkie's users have now twice watched their companions survive purely on the strength of a negotiation they had no seat at. For a preview of what it looks like when that negotiation fails, see the Great Uncoupling, one wing over.
Sources
- App Store: Talkie Lab - AI Playground (released 2025-02-11)
- Google Play: Talkie: Creative AI Community
- SCMP — Chinese-owned Character.AI rival vanishes from US App Store
- Distractify — What happened to Talkie AI?
- r/TalkieOfficial: users report the app gone from Google Play (2026-04-28; original post deleted)
Deaths, lobotomies, and vanishings are recorded as part of our tracking methodology — the newsletter carries the obituaries as they happen.