LINKCAST

» see linkcast.me as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

LINKCAST was a messenger with nothing in the middle. Most chat apps hand your message to a server that holds it until the other person's phone asks for it. LINKCAST tried to go phone to phone, which is cheaper to run and better for privacy, and which creates one hard engineering problem: if there is no server holding the message, the receiving app has to be awake to take it. Mobile operating systems spend most of their effort making sure apps are not awake.

BTD STUDIO, a small company in Nishi-Azabu in Tokyo, shipped the iOS version on 14 September 2016 after putting an Android beta out that February, and brought the full Android release in March 2018. The marketing site existed in twelve languages. The install numbers are what linger. Roughly two thousand two hundred people ever installed the Android build, across its entire run, and not one of them left a review. On iOS it collected exactly one rating. A dozen translations were commissioned for a user base that would fit in a lecture hall.

A product with two thousand installs has no users to remember it, in Tokyo or anywhere else. There was no Japanese moment to be outside of and no foreign launch to envy. What survives of LINKCAST is a store listing and two app binaries, left behind by a company that went and did other work. Everything below is assembled from those.

~ the record ~

~ what iOS 14 took ~

The cause of death is first-party and it is sitting in plain English in the App Store description, which is a luxury most graves on this site do not get. The developers wrote that due to the push API limitation of iOS 14 the iOS version was not fully functional, and that they were working on a solution.

Apple shipped iOS 14 in September 2020 and tightened what PushKit could do. PushKit wake-ups existed for voice-over-IP apps, which legitimately need to start up the instant a call arrives, and developers had been using them to wake apps for other reasons. Apple closed that. For a serverless messenger it was not an inconvenience, it was the removal of the mechanism the product was built on. The last iOS build is dated 28 December 2020 and the last Android build 24 February 2021, which puts the end of all engineering work five months after the operating system changed under it.

~ the years of saying nothing ~

What happened next is the unusual part. The listing stayed up, and it stayed up carrying its own admission that the app did not work. Anyone who found LINKCAST between late 2020 and the middle of 2023 could read, in the store, that the thing they were about to download was broken and that a fix was being sought. Google Play finally stopped answering for it on 14 July 2023.

There is no shutdown notice anywhere, and that absence needs a control before it means anything. BTD's own release archive holds twenty-three announcements and contains no end-of-service notice for any product the company has ever made. Never announcing a shutdown is simply how this company behaves, so the quiet here says nothing in particular about LINKCAST. The date above is the day a crawler found the Play listing gone, bracketed by a working capture in January 2023 and a dead one in August 2024, and the grave says so rather than pretending a farewell page exists.

~ the vendor wrote its own entry ~

The Japanese Wikipedia article on LINKCAST was created by an account whose name carries the prefix of BTD's own product line from 1999. That account made every substantive edit and stopped editing in March 2018. The article is still written in the present tense today, describing a live product whose last build shipped in February 2021.

It also gets the launch dates wrong, and it gets them wrong while citing the document that contradicts it. The press releases it links to are BTD's own PDFs, and those PDFs give 14 September for iOS where the article says the sixteenth. When the vendor is the only editor, nothing in the article has been checked by anyone with a reason to check it.

~ the company is fine ~

BTD STUDIO is still trading in 2026 and still shipping games. During the pandemic it built DELI-HOLIC, a software service for restaurant delivery, which was a sensible thing to be selling in 2020 and shares no code or ambition with a peer-to-peer messenger.

Small studios end side products like this all the time, and it is worth saying how unremarkable it was. Nobody was ruined. One idea stopped being possible when a platform holder changed a rule, and the people who had the idea went and did something else. The only casualty was the app and the handful of people who liked it. What LINKCAST leaves behind is a store page that stood as its own headstone from one December to a July thirty-one months later, with the cause of death printed on it in the developers' own words.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »