Otofu

» see otofu.app as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Dwango announced it on 15 April 2022 and opened it on Saturday the 23rd, which was day one of Niconico Chokaigi, the company's own festival. The sentence at the top of the press release is the clearest statement of intent any of these apps ever managed: somebody who is not family and not a friend, and you just want to talk. Voice only. One person at a time. For the eight days of Chokaigi there was a special category inside the app and three hundred free points for everybody who turned up.

Availability was a switch. Each account had a standby toggle, and turning it on put you on the list of people who could be rung. Callers browsed the home screen or searched, and your profile was an avatar, a nickname and a set of topic tags you were free to write yourself. Four categories held everything: chat, music, advice, and voice. Under them sat the tags, and a meaningful share of the tags describe the sound of a person rather than a subject: good voice, husky, impressions, I'll listen.

It was not a niconico login. Sign-in ran through an outside account plus a one-off identity check the first time, and after that the app knew nothing else about you.

~ the chronicle ~

~ once a week each ~

Seven minutes a call and four outgoing calls a day, and the same person only once in any week. Paid points bought you extra minutes and extra calls, and bought gift animations that played during the call, and whoever was listening took a cut of that as a tip, redeemable for LINE points in as little as a day. Anyone under eighteen could speak but could not be paid.

Those limits read as a defense against people monopolizing each other, built into an app whose difficulty ran the other way.

~ eight hundred and forty ~

Google Play showed the install count in its usual vague bucket, 500 or more. AppBrain, which crawls the store and keeps its own tally, recorded 840 installs for the Android build over its whole run, and zero ratings. The iPhone version had nine ratings averaging 3.3 stars by December 2022. The most prominent of those reviews, left that May, says there is nobody here, and that more than nine in ten of the people showing as available are men.

Almost everything written above comes out of one press release, because after the launch week nobody covered Otofu again. The trade press ran the announcement, the store listings recorded the version numbers, and that is the entire written record of a product that ran for twenty months.

~ nobody wrote it down ~

The last iPhone build landed on 17 November 2022 and the last Android build on 12 December, which is roughly eight months after launch. The site was still answering requests in February 2023. The Japanese encyclopedia had Otofu listed among Dwango's live services on 3 September 2023 and moved it into the finished column five weeks later, citing nothing at all, which means an editor noticed it was gone. AppBrain last saw the Play listing alive at twenty past one in the afternoon on 1 January 2024 and marked it removed.

Otofu sold prepaid points, and in Japan that normally obliges an operator to publish a refund notice when it closes. Dwango publishes those for its other dead products and they are easy to find. I could not find one for Otofu. otofu.app has no DNS record.

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