This time last year, the hottest Chinese tech product was DeepSeek’s market-moving artificial intelligence (AI) model. This year, it is something far simpler: An app for people worried about dying alone. The bluntly named “Are You Dead?” platform rocketed to the top of the app store charts in China before going viral globally. The interface is almost aggressively plain. Users, largely people living alone, tap to confirm they are still alive. Miss two days in a row and an emergency contact gets notified.
Besides its provocative moniker, there is a reason the app went mega-viral without spending a dime on advertising — and did not even have to pretend to be a buzzy new AI product. Its surge coincided with the nation’s birthrate plunging to its lowest on record, at a time when marriage figures are falling and divorces are ticking up.
While many assumed it was developed for elderly users seeking to hold on to their independence, it was actually created by a team of Gen-Z developers who said in interviews they were inspired by their own experiences of isolating urban life. One-person households are expected to swell to as many as 200 million in China by 2030.
Illustration: Yusha
These demographic changes are not unique to modern China, but they are definitely not the kind of publicity Beijing wants right now. The platform was quietly removed from Chinese app stores last week. In a culture where frank mentions of dying are seen as taboo and inauspicious, the creators said on Weibo that they were planning on rebranding. The new international name, “Demumu,” is a Labubu-fied riff on the word “death.” It did not catch on as expected, and the developers are now crowdsourcing a new idea via social media.
Despite striking a nerve in Beijing and around the world, the product’s concept is annoyingly good. I am jealous I did not think of it. As Big Tech and start-ups race to come up with the next hit AI application, the most common complaint I hear from actual humans is that many of these tools are solutions hunting for a problem. I do not need a model to summarize a two-line message from a friend, and having software interpose itself in basic intimacy could feel more intrusive than helpful.
“Are You Dead?” does the opposite. It is not trying to be clever, but purely practical. It offers a small sense of security to people living solo — even as its existence makes plain a rising loneliness epidemic. The name, a dark twist on the popular “Are You Hungry?” food delivery platform, channels the nihilistic Gen-Z humor of the lay-flat generation. Online, many Chinese youth did not treat it as offensive, but rather as a kind of memento mori.
Efforts to force AI into more facets of our life have rightly commanded the spotlight, but across Asia and beyond, eldercare tech is poised to boom.
Beijing has been touting the silver economy as a future engine of growth, pointing to seniors’ rising spending power and willingness to adopt new digital platforms. Rather than discourage these innovations and the uncomfortable questions they raise, the government should welcome these tools.
The American Association of Retired Persons forecasted that older Americans’ spending on technology would rise to US$120 billion by 2030, despite 59 percent of adults older than 50 feeling it is not designed with their age in mind. There is a ballooning opportunity globally for developers to tap into this market and ameliorate that disconnect.
The deeper debate unleashed by the app’s virality is something that would be even harder for the industry to address: Is technology making us more or less lonely? Globally, social media has made it much more convenient to avoid meeting in person. In China, super-apps have optimized everything — you do not have to say a word to a real person to hail a ride or order delivery meals and essentials. And in the pursuit of AI supremacy, people are working longer hours, driven by a grueling (and technically illegal) 996 culture that encourages more time away from home.
DeepSeek was China’s splashy tech moment; “Are You Dead?” is the hangover. The no-frills check-in app did not top the charts because of brilliant engineering. It went viral because it translated demographic and social anxiety into a push notification. Beijing could scrub it from the stores and its creators could try to Labubu-fy “death.” The underlying demand it exposed for connection would not disappear.
It is also a warning shot for the AI industry: The next hit product likely would not be built on summarizing our conversations. It would be one that confronts why we are having fewer of them. In the race to make machines more human, China’s first breakout app of the year just asks if you still have a pulse.
Catherine Thorbecke is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia tech. Previously she was a tech reporter at CNN and ABC News. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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