After the leading fan-tracking app shut down: a Japanese app that watches your 推し for you hit #8 overall in three weeks

Japan's largest 推し-support (fan-tracking) app shut down in August, leaving hundreds of thousands of registered 推し and a crowd of fans with nowhere to go. Twenty-odd small apps rushed in, and none caught them. Then 「推シラセ」 launched in October with a different idea: don't make you log things, watch for you instead. Three weeks later it hit #8 overall Top Free on the Japan App Store, and people are buying subscriptions. Here's what it got right, where users came from, where the money comes from, and where you could still enter.

A shared post with 179k views

At 2:30 PM Japan time on Nov 2026, 3, an ordinary fan named 「メンディー」 on X posted two screenshots with one line:

このアプリすごい👏✨️👏 【推シラセ】 ひと目でわかる!!! ウィジェット追加もある! #胡桃のあ

"This app is amazing! You can see everything at a glance! There's even a widget!" The hashtag is for 胡桃のあ of the VTuber group ぶいすぽっ!. In the screenshot, her photo has been automatically cut out and "pops" out of the home-screen window, with her latest streams, videos, and merch deadlines below. As of 11-06 the post had about 179k views, 1,700 likes, and 619 bookmarks (X post page, 11-06).

Within the same minute, the small VTuber 日向なこ also posted a recommendation. That night, underground idol 夢咲ゆん posted: "There seems to be a 推し-tracking app called 推シラセ! If you can, please register 夢咲ゆん too~" The day before (11-02), a fan had posted: "Found a super cute 推し-tracking app. Enter a name and you get news about your 推し every day."

The Japan App Store numbers moved too: the Lifestyle Top Free chart went from #90 on 11-02 to #1 on 11-03, overall Top Free reached #13 on 11-03, and #8 on 11-04. Ratings rose from 125 on 10-28 to 810 on 11-06, with 129, 250, and 251 new ratings per day between 11-04 and 11-06 (Japan App Store chart and ratings data, 10-28 to 11-06). 11-06 average 4.70.

What it is

In one line: pick a 推し, its official accounts get registered automatically, and new activity gets pulled in for you.

The store page is blunt: choose from about 50k candidates across idols, VTubers, K-POP, voice actors, actors, and anime characters. The app registers their official YouTube, X, and website, which it has already verified, all at once. It then runs on a schedule to collect new content from those places into one timeline, so "you don't have to switch between SNS, this one tells you what your 推し did today." Ticket and merch deadlines sit at the top as "things to do today," with reminders one day and three hours before each.

The rest is the part people want to screenshot: automatic photo cutout that pops out of the home-screen window; a membership-card-style 「推し証」 showing how many days you've supported them and how many days until their birthday; home-screen and lock-screen widgets; spending on your 推し tracked by month and by person; and merch photos turned into stickers.

It's made by appful Inc. of Tokyo, founded in March 2026. The same developer account has 47 apps (iTunes, 11-06): the LINE chat-compatibility app 「めろとーく」 with 7,299 ratings, the infidelity-investigation game 「cheaters」 with 2,542 ratings, and the Y2K camera filter app 「Pixie+」 with 2,278 ratings, with new releases almost every month. Its website advertises "high-speed app development" for young people and 2M cumulative downloads. 推シラセ is one bet this studio hit, not one person's year-long project.

Why now: the leader closed its doors

The biggest Japanese 推し-support app, 「Oshibana」 (published by booklista, launched in 2021, claims 1.2M downloads, 12,746 App Store ratings), went into a "view-only" mode after a forced update in 2026-08-20: you can't create or edit anything anymore. It also added data export (per the official Oshibana note announcement). Its homepage said that as of 2026-03, users had registered 865,860 推し.

停更之后,X、Instagram 上一直有人在问「用什么代替」,也有独立开发者公开说「在做替代 App」。6 月以后上架、名字里带「推し + 记录 / 情报 / 通知」的新 App 有二十来个——Fanlio、推シツジ、推しLog、FanHive、oshi 等——到 11-06 评分全都不到 60 条(App Store 日区)。

They all failed the same way: they clone Oshibana and make you manually log anniversaries, schedules, and spending. 推シラセ does the opposite. The most-praised point in the reviews is this:

I used to manually add live stream times to my calendar app. Now it manages my schedule automatically, so easy. ——Japan App Store review

Interestingly, it doesn't import Oshibana's exported data. So it isn't winning people through migration. It showed up just as the same crowd was searching for alternatives, and it was simply easier to use.

Where users came from: fans sharing screenshots, streamers recruiting

The official accounts did little work: TikTok @oshirase.official has 377 followers, with the top video at about 8,600 views (11-01). Its official X has only 17 posts. No ads turned up in our search (that doesn't mean none ran). Judging by the ratings curve and posts on X, two organic channels drove most of it:

First, screenshots. The home screen was designed to be screenshotted: cutout that breaks the frame, 「推し証」, widgets. Posted on X, it's instantly clear what it is. 「かわいい」 shows up again and again in reviews, and some write "I started after seeing it on SNS."

Second, the people being tracked push it themselves. That's the cleverest part: small VTubers and underground idols want fans to make them their 推し, so they post things like "Register me on Oshirase" on their own. Every small streamer is doing free distribution for it, and Japan has thousands of them. 11-03 Whether those two posts a minute apart were organic spread or planned seeding can't be told from the outside (unverified).

Another coincidence: Nov 4 is Japan's "いい推しの日" (11/04 sounds like "good oshi"), and TikTok had a batch of related content that day, while the app's Top Free and Top Grossing peaks landed on 11-04. Whether this was deliberate timing is unverified.

Where the money comes from

Subscriptions: ¥600/month or ¥4,800/year. The free version lets you register 2 推し, with new activity pushed twice a day, morning and evening. Watching one ad temporarily unlocks a 3rd 推し for 7 days. The paid version has no limit on how many 推し you can add, checks every 15 minutes, and removes ads.

The paywall sits on "how many people you support," which is a precise fit for heavy fans. One review reads: 「推しが50人以上いるので…すぐにサブスク課金しました」 ("I have 50 or more 推し… so I subscribed right away"). Its best Japan Lifestyle Top Grossing rank was #16 (11-04), and 11-06 was #44. It doesn't appear on overall Top Grossing. No revenue is public. Going by Lifestyle Top Grossing #16, monthly revenue is probably in the several-million-yen range (estimate, low confidence).

Where it falls short

• The spike hasn't proven it can last. Overall Top Free went from #11-04 to #8,11-06 and has since slipped to #72. Lifestyle Top Free is #5 and Top Grossing is #44. Whether it keeps users next month is the biggest open question.
• iOS only. Under 11-03's post on X, one of the first replies already asks about Android.
• Scraping accuracy. Reviews say one VTuber's live-stream info keeps getting filed under "merch," and new videos only surface as Shorts. Someone couldn't find the official Hatsune Miku account.
• Source of the X data. It has to regularly scrape tens of thousands of official X accounts. The official API is expensive, and scraping risks getting blocked. This is probably the most fragile link in the whole product (inference).
• Privacy labels don't match. A small YouTube channel pointed out that the store privacy label says "used for tracking" while the user agreement says "no tracking."

It moves fast: in three weeks it went from 1.2 to 1.3.3,11-06, and the current version can already pull concert schedules straight from a 推し's posts into your calendar. The official X bio says "new features every week."

Who it's competing with

No one has copied Oshirase yet, as far as I can see. The real moat is its roughly 50k verified official-account database. A new user sees content within the first minute, which a manual app can't match. But the database is buildable: most idols, VTubers and voice actors list their official accounts on agency sites and wikis, and a small team could clean that up with a script plus an LLM in a few weeks (inference).

If it were you

A. The "track your oshi for you" format is proven in Japan: people install it and pay for it, and few outside Japan know about it. Copying the Japanese iOS app is pointless. The opportunity is what it doesn't cover: Japanese Android, and fan communities on X in other languages.

Who it's for: a team of 1–3 people, with someone who can handle data scraping (scheduled collection and deduplication across X, YouTube and official sites), and someone who knows a fandom and speaks its language. Ideally you already run a fan account on X or TikTok.

Who it's not for: anyone who only wants another manual logging app (there are twenty predecessors, none with 60 reviews); anyone who can't afford or work around X data costs; anyone who wants to fight the Japanese iOS app head-on (appful ships every week and already has first-mover word of mouth).

How to build it: start with the entity database. Pick one fandom (K-POP, VTubers, Thai BL actors, for example) and verify the official YouTube, X, Instagram and website for several thousand oshi. The product is three screens: a timeline, "to-do today" (deadlines), and a shareable oshi profile page with widgets. The free tier caps you at 2 oshi, subscriptions unlock more, and pricing can reference ¥600/month. Pick one of two routes: Japanese Android (Oshirase is iOS-only, and people on X are asking for Android), or switch languages. Chinese-speaking fandoms in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and K-POP and BL fans in Thailand, rely heavily on X (inference; I haven't checked each local competitor).

How to get users: copy its two moves. Design the profile page so people want to screenshot it and post on X. Then go after small VTubers, underground idols and new groups, and get them to post "register me in the app." Give them a personal sign-up link or a leaderboard of sign-ups, so they have a reason to keep promoting it. Time launches to fandom holidays (in Japan that's 11-04, "Good Oshi Day"; for K-POP, group debut anniversaries and comeback days).

Deadline: the Japanese Android window closes when appful ships its Android version. Given its release cadence, that's probably a month or two away (inference). The language-switch route isn't as urgent, but you should have a working version before the first half of 2027.

You're reading it wrong: ① 推シラセ dropped out of the Japan-store Lifestyle Top Free chart by December, from #50 to #100 in Top Grossing. That means November was a one-off spike and the subscription isn't keeping people. ② appful shipped an Android version before you did and took the same word-of-mouth. ③ X tightens its API or blocks scraping, and the timeline updates slow noticeably or switch to users pasting links manually. Then the core of this business doesn't hold. ④ The other way around: if it's still holding around #30 in Lifestyle Top Grossing a month or two from now, demand is stronger than it looks, and a version in another language is worth doubling down on.

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Data and sources: App Store Japan chart data, rating counts and reviews (10-28 to 11-06); iTunes lookup (11-06: ratings, version, developer's app list); store page description and release notes; Oshibana's official note announcements and website; appful's website; X post pages (read from @menmennnn1, @nako_3rl, @yumesaki_yun, @Emuti__1215, @oshirase_2026,11-06); TikTok @oshirase.official; YouTube video SRrSr_HXYy8. Anything marked "estimate," "inference" or "unverified" is exactly that.