Skoob's old users lost their reading dates, and two Brazilians caught a small batch of them: Livrim, a reading social app, 12k installs

Livrim is a Brazilian Portuguese reading-tracker and reading social app. It basically rebuilds Skoob, the long-running Brazilian reading community, making it nicer and more stable, with one-click import of old data. It is far from a hit: 12k cumulative installs on Google Play, a hundred-plus per day. What's worth watching is how it got started. An old community that had been around for over a decade got worse after an acquisition, and after a year of built-up resentment, two indie developers picked up a small share from those who left, through replying to every post and a long beta. Anyone wanting to copy it should know the biggest winner from this wave is not it.

A long post with 52 likes

In 2026, June 22, a Bluesky reader named karol in Brazil posted a long thread that opened with: "Recommend Livrim, an app made by readers for readers." Below it, point by point: you can record reading, set goals, organize shelves and lists, add friends; you can import Goodreads data directly into your shelves (Maratona and other apps using the same export format work too); books missing from the catalog can be added manually and go live after review; there is a new-books and pre-order section, and tapping through goes to Amazon links, "buying through the pre-order links, the app gets a small commission from Amazon"; and finally a reminder that the app isn't officially launched yet and you can only join the closed beta via livrim.app.

The post got 52 likes and 16 reposts. At a time when Livrim's own Bluesky account had only 37 followers, this was its most effective content. In Jul 11, karol posted again: "Friends of Livrim, leave your username or link here so we can find each other over there." That's how Livrim grew early on: readers pulled each other in on X and Bluesky and moved their shelves over.

What it is and who made it

There's nothing new in the features: shelves split into reading / read / want to read / dropped, progress tracked by pages or percentage, star ratings and reviews, a friend activity feed, public reading profiles, yearly goals and stats. The Oct 30 release added reading time, monthly summaries, sharing reviews and quotes to Stories, three-level shelf privacy, an "already own" tag, and a dark theme. It is available on Android, iOS, and web (my.livrim.app), Portuguese only.

The store developer was later changed to the company LIVRIM TECNOLOGIA LTDA, with the individual name Brandon Silva. The official account said in Sep 11 that "we are a two-person indie team," so there are likely two people behind it.

Timeline: account registered on X in May; Android public beta and iOS TestFlight in June; in Jul 14 the official account said "over a thousand downloads of the beta on both platforms"; in Aug 17 Android opened to more countries; in Sep 5 the iOS app launched officially, and in Sep 14 the Play listing went live.

Scale

Before the official launch it already had 7,700 installs, meaning most of the volume was built during the beta from 6 to September, not after launch. From October it has been adding about 50 to 150 per day, with no acceleration. The +757 on Nov 3 is a combined figure because Play refreshes only every two days, not a single-day spike.

It has only charted in one store: 11-06 ranked #131 in the Brazil Books Top Free chart (Google Play). The iOS Brazil store has only 17 ratings, and its highest point in the Books free category was #48. I found no sign of paid acquisition, and the install curve is flat with no sudden jumps (inference: no ad library records were seen, so it can't be fully ruled out).

Why now: Skoob broke

Skoob is the default choice for Brazil's reading community, around for 2009 years, with 4.69M installs and 150k ratings on Play, still adding about 1,500 new installs a day today (Google Play, 11-06). In 2024 August it was bought from Americanas by the ebook platform Skeelo, and in 2025 Sep 23 it had a major redesign, which the official account itself admitted "brought some instability."

Complaints kept coming for the next year. On Reddit's r/Livros someone asked "Is Skoob completely finished?", a blogger said that after fifteen or sixteen years on Skoob, finished-book dates were lost, and on Reclame Aqui someone complained that "my PLUS points were taken." On X, one user wrote: "Officially moved to Livrim. Unhappy with Skoob for years... books I've read started disappearing, dates never saved properly, and got scrambled." Another asked "besides Skoob, what does everyone use?" and someone replied with Livrim.

Where users come from

1. Catching the people leaving Skoob. This is the root cause. Livrim is the closest to Skoob among these alternatives, with social shelves, reviews, and friend activity all there, so old users can move over without relearning.
2. Making the move as cheap as possible. Built-in CSV import for Goodreads / Maratona formats. Someone in the community even made a Chrome extension, "Skoob para Goodreads e Livrim," to export a Skoob shelf into a format Livrim accepts, updated to 1.7.0 in Aug 26. When third parties write migration tools for you, it means you've become one of the default destinations.
3. The official account replies to nearly everything. @livrim_app registered in May and has posted 1,624 tweets so far, mostly replies to users: removing books people imported by mistake, explaining why covers are missing, teasing the next version. From 6 to October it shipped a version roughly every two or three weeks, each with a long post on "what's new." Users come to feel it's "our app."
4. A long beta with a special badge. A beta of over three months, ending with a post saying "sign up before Sep 16 and get an exclusive badge," later extended to Sep 20.
5. Very little video. A YouTube reviewer, Resenhando Sonhos, "testing new reading apps: Livrim, Paginei, DeadBooks" got 9,130 views; the biggest TikTok recommendation got 5,172 views, and the official account has 68 followers. On Reddit someone wrote: "Livrim feels a lot like Skoob, but I think it's better... the interface is beautiful."

Where the money comes from

Still no clear money. Play marks it as containing ads and in-app purchases, with in-app prices of $1.49 to $25.99, and I couldn't confirm what is sold. The other revenue is Amazon affiliate commission from the pre-order section, which karol's post spelled out, and at the end of September the official account was promoting "the October new-book pre-order list is updated." For a reading-tracker product, affiliate income can be estimated: for a community with only ten to twenty thousand users, roughly tens to hundreds of dollars a month (inference).

Who it's competing with

After Skoob broke, a batch of alternatives appeared in Brazil in the first half of 2026, and Livrim is just one of them:

Ziggur, which started at the same time as Livrim, got 4 times the volume and has already started taking payments on iOS. The difference is acquisition: Livrim relies only on reading-community word of mouth, while Ziggur goes after TikTok creators.

Why it stalled at 12k

Reading social apps have network effects: book catalogs, reviews, and friend connections are still on Skoob. Most people only complain, and few actually move. Livrim targets only the old users who want to move over as-is, and that caps its ceiling; it has no acquisition channel of its own and hasn't done TikTok. No media has covered it yet, its revenue isn't public, and only Brazil's reading community knows it exists.

If it were you

One-line verdict: Don't go after Brazil against Livrim. Five or six players are already splitting the same defecting users there, and Skoob itself hasn't died. What's worth copying is how it caught the window: when a regional legacy community gets acquired and degrades, rebuild a modern version, and make data import the first thing you ship.

Who it's for: someone who knows a non-English reading community (or another hobby circle: binge-watching, anime, birdwatching, board game logging), is a heavy user themselves, and is willing to live in the community and reply to posts every day, alone or with one or two others.

Who it's not for: anyone who wants to make money from this. Reading-log money is thin. Affiliate commissions and small in-app purchases can't support a full-time job. To earn, you need a subscription like Ziggur's, and you'd also have to make TikToks yourself. If you don't want to do community management, skip this, because the whole approach depends on it.

How to do it: Start by picking the target. You want a product with a local legacy community of ten-plus years that was recently acquired or heavily redesigned, with a string of "lost my data", "the redesign is hard to use" complaints you can find in app store reviews and on Reddit. Then do three things: import data from the old platform and Goodreads, where the import must not fail; keep the bookshelf exactly as long-time users know it; and run a long beta in which early users get badges.

How to get users: Find your first users where the old platform's users are venting: X, Bluesky, Reddit, the app store's one-star reviews. Reply to them one by one, and turn the migration guide into a long post. The second step must be an active channel. BookTok, the TikTok book creators, is the most ready-made option, and Ziggur has already shown this works in Brazil.

When the window closes: This kind of window follows the old platform's collapse. Once the old platform is fixed, or the first replacement becomes the default for everyone, the window is shut. It usually lasts about a year (my estimate). Brazil's window is already crowded.

What would prove us wrong: if Livrim keeps going past 50k installs and holds a few hundred a day before early 2027, or charts in Brazil's Books top grossing, then the "social bookshelf that feels like the old platform" path runs further than we thought. The other way: if Skoob fixes its problems, users drift back, and Livrim's daily installs fall to a few dozen, the window is shorter than it looks.

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Data and sources: Google Play store page, Brazil charts, and install counts (11-06); the first-party install figure from October is a third-party estimate, 9–October; App Store Brazil rating and charts (11-06); Livrim's official Bluesky and X @livrim_app; karol (@withmiyy)'s long Bluesky post (2026-06-22, 07-11); Reddit r/Livros discussion (only the search snippets were read); the YouTube review by Resenhando Sonhos; the Chrome extension "Skoob para Goodreads e Livrim"; reporting on Skoob's acquisition (PublishNews 2024-08-20, Exame) and its redesign announcement; Ziggur's TikTok view counts. Revenue scale, whether they buy paid acquisition, and the length of the window are inferences or unverified.