A statement on the Appocalypse (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

Quick update: Chatruletka and Omegle.tv apps (and more) have been removed from Google Play and the App Store, reportedly due to Australian regulatory pressure on Google and Apple over questionable content created on these platforms.

Just search twitter to get a rough idea. We don't think there is any omegle alternative that handles moderation better than they did, it’s the scale, political environment and cherry picking that always kills good things.

The web versions still work, but they were probably a rounding error in terms of revenue, so over time the effect on these platforms will be significant.

We have long switched our primary focus away from these platforms because they kept provoking us while having a huge omegle clone in the app store, but still need to post about this since most of people in our Patreon community use these services.

We only learned about this today, even though it happened about two weeks ago.

For the record: we were not involved in those attacks. We were supposed to use this weakness as a last resort like a dirty nuclear weapon, but that was not us.

Sometimes things just happen and this is a timeline alteration event that is not connected to us.

Why we even need to state that?

Well, when one makes modifications for 10 years, the perception of where the wind is blowing naturally develops, so I've been yapping a lot about

and

I think it’s important to share this because we haven’t posted here in a while, and now that the biggest mobile platform lost their apps, people might become suspicious.

We’ve been dealing with Chrome banning internal browser modifications; mounting such an attack is pointless, even though we reduced the blast radius over the whole genocide thing.

This is unrelated, but I have a sharpened perception from ten years of experience creating various cheat and mod software.

How this affects us?

We’ve completely lost trust in these platforms because of the cringeworthy way they treated our project. They built anti-cheat on top of open-source software—why provoke cheaters?

But overall it's not even in the top 10 of our worst experiences in the past years, and we have our own battles to fight and opportunities to pursue.

More web Omegle users benefits us—we’re improving that experience, making random video chats safer primarily targeting legitimate content creation use cases, and obviously will take advantage of the situation however we can. But apps kept us from having to deal with the increased risks of further marginalization and we always treated them as a sacred environment, and losing them is not something we wished for in the first place.

Our project will significantly change as a result of this concerning development, probably splitting into smaller focused tools targeted at different groups of users, and also we will expand beyond our niche. We constantly evolve and already restarted the development twice in 2025 alone.

We keep experimenting with new ideas and will post here whenever something that matches our quality control standards is ready.

We obviously don’t know all details but will keep an eye on the situation.

As for the platforms that suffered, they were the kind of bully we couldn't do anything about except try to deescalate the situation, because our users depended on them much more than we did, and their apps would have fallen much faster otherwise with no added benefit for our project, and everyone would have blamed us for it.

They kept poking the dead body with a stick in 2024, but hurting chat platforms is not in the interests of our community, and we have always put our users first.

We expected they would decline naturally, but thought it would happen in phases, not all at once in a coordinated takedown across all mobile platforms. Our condolences to everyone affected by this, find strength to carry on, like we always do.

We once supported these platforms as Omegle successors, hoping they’d manage such risks better than Omegle did.

Now is the time to see if that’s true.

Posting a little bit of nostalgia from 2010, the year when omegle first launched its video chat, minecraft launched in alpha and internet overall was a much better place to be in. It has ABSOLUTELY no hidden meaning, but we hope you know what you are doing.

Good luck, and welcome home.

- Videochat Extension