Dot

» see new.computer as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Dot was an iPhone app that remembered you. You talked to it the way you would talk to somebody who had been paying attention for months, and it answered with the accumulated context of everything you had told it before. The pitch was not productivity. It was a thing to confide in, and the company behind it, New Computer, said so plainly: computers ought to understand and help people at a deeper and more human level than they currently do.

The company was founded in 2023 by Sam Whitmore and Jason Yuan, a designer who had come from Apple, and Dot shipped in June 2024. It got the kind of press a well-designed app with an unusual premise gets, and in 2024 that meant a great deal of press. The farewell letter claims the product grew to help hundreds of thousands of people. Appfigures, a firm that tracks app store installs, put the lifetime iOS download count at 24,500.

On 5 September 2025 the two founders published a wind-down notice. They had spent the previous year trying to take Dot from personal intelligence into social intelligence, and in the course of that work they arrived at what the letter calls the shared realization that their Northstars as founders had diverged. The app kept running for a further month and switched off on 5 October 2025.

~ the chronicle ~

~ two northstars ~

Companies die of funding, lawsuits, acquisition and obsolescence. This one died of a disagreement about what the product was for, and both of the people responsible put their names to that in public without nominating a villain. "Rather than compromise either vision, we've decided to go our separate ways and wind down operations." Most shutdown letters reach for a market that failed to materialize. This one says the problem was internal and that neither founder would bend.

The letter also does something shutdown letters have rarely needed to do. It acknowledges that closing the app means a lot of people lose a confidante, and calls that "somewhat unprecedented in software". Then it gives them a month of notice for the express purpose of saying goodbye to it. Whatever you make of a chatbot as a friend, the people who built this one scheduled a grieving window into the shutdown plan.

Data export was a settings-page button marked "Request your data", available right up to the final day. Memory had been the distinguishing feature of the product, so the archive a departing user pulled down held every conversation the app had been built to remember.

~ the download numbers ~

Twenty-four thousand five hundred lifetime installs on iOS is a number small enough to picture, and it covers the whole life of the product. The farewell letter says hundreds of thousands of people were helped. Appfigures was counting one app store and the letter was not, so the two are not flatly contradictory, but an order of magnitude sits between them. Dot was an English-language iPhone app with no Turkish version, so what reached me here was the design writing about it, and there was a great deal more of that than there were installs. The distance between the commentary and the install count is the most 2024 fact in this grave.

~ the letter is still there ~

new.computer resolves today and serves the goodbye note as its homepage, roughly 25 KB of it. The note is signed "Sam and Jason" above a footer reading "© 2023- 2025 New Computer". There is no marketing left on the domain and no redirect to anybody's new venture.

That makes this one of the better-documented small shutdowns of the period. Most farewell posts go dark whenever the hosting bill does, usually inside a couple of months. This one is still the first thing the domain serves. A year on, a former user of Dot can still read the paragraph explaining why their confidante was switched off, and the date it happened.

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