TOKYO: This time last year, the hottest Chinese tech product was DeepSeek’s market-moving artificial intelligence (AI) model. In 2026, it’s 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’s a reason the app went mega-viral without spending a dime on advertising - and didn’t even have to pretend to be a buzzy new AI product. Its surge coincided with the nation’s birth rate 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 the country by 2030.

These demographic changes aren’t unique to modern China, but they’re 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 also said on micro-blogging site Weibo that they were planning on rebranding. The new international name, Demumu, is a Labubu-fied riff on the word “death.” It didn’t catch on as expected, and the developers are now crowdsourcing a new idea via social media.

A GREAT CONCEPT

Despite strikin...