A detective-girl account with 205 followers, one video at 510k views: Untraced climbs to 250k installs in a crowded "phone-search crime solving" niche

A small Vietnamese casual game studio made a free mobile game out of "go through the victim's phone and find the killer." It launched in late July and, in just over three months, climbed to 250k installs on Google Play and landed on the Entertainment top-grossing charts in Australia, Canada, and the UK. It didn't invent this mechanic, and it isn't even this year's number one. It broke out for two reasons: a batch of persona accounts posting daily on TikTok, and a web version that runs in the browser with no install. Here's what it is, where the traffic comes from, how the money is made, who's competing with it, and whether it's still worth getting into.

A video asking "why hasn't anyone heard of this game?"

On 2026 Oct 26, an account called miaonthecase posted a 15-second TikTok with a single line of caption: "Does anyone else know about this game?! It's called Untraced" (hashtags #unsolvedmysteries #detective #mobilegame). The account had only about two hundred followers at the time. By Nov 6 this video had 516k views and 26k likes.

The top comment was "It scares me😭" (341 likes), the second was "honestly too scared, deleted it"; after that came "where do I download it," "isn't this just Simulacra," "reminds me of Sara Is Missing," and one with a single like: "It's paid :("

The account wasn't sharing by accident. From Oct 27 to Nov 5 it posted almost every day, rotating the copy: "Everyone NEEDS to play Untraced!" "Untraced is the best game ever!" "Best halloween game is untraced!" "go to playuntraced.com". Most posts only got a few thousand views. One or two blew up (TikTok, 11-06).

What it is

"The victim's phone," turned into a game. The store page opens with "A phone. An open case. A night that doesn't add up." You get a fully simulated phone: texts, photos (including deleted ones), email, notes, calendar, maps, voice memos, banking and social apps, with passcodes you have to find from clues. The website breaks gameplay into three steps: unlock her phone → assistant Maya asks you 20 questions, each answer hidden somewhere in the phone → pick the killer from six suspects.

The site lists 10 cases, leaning hard into the flavor of true-crime podcasts: a premed student dies at a fraternity pool (The Plunge), a trainee dies in a locked bathroom that the company calls suicide (The Dossier), a missing girl and an unused bus ticket (Ava), a "perfect boyfriend" and a fatal fall (Liv).

The developer is Hohama Studio, a Vietnamese team, which listed the game on Google Play in Jul 23. It doesn't show up in App Store search (App Store search, 11-06). iPhone users go through the web version at playuntraced.com, where tapping "Open the phone" starts the game right in the browser.

The numbers: steady climb, not an explosion

Source: third-party estimated curve since launch + daily Google Play scrapes. There was a wave of 3,000–9,000 per day in mid-August, then it settled at 2,000–4,000 per day. 4,448 ratings, 4.4 stars, about 50 new ratings per day.

On the charts, it ranked #73 on the Australia Entertainment free chart and #104 in Canada, with Entertainment top-grossing ranks 117–150 across Australia, Canada, and the UK. It appears in 7 countries' charts, never on an overall chart, and not in the US store (Google Play, 11-06). The web version's volume isn't visible from outside; the 250k on Play is likely only part of the picture (inference).

Where the traffic comes from: a persona account network, plus a web version to catch iPhones

Search "untraced game" on TikTok and the first few dozen videos are almost all from accounts made specifically for this game, all built from one template: mayonthecase, mayaonthecase, skyy_onthecase, rachel_detective (which also posts in Spanish), detectivecourtney, ellathedetective, plus charlotte.untraced, which puts the product name right in the handle. Several videos are tagged #ad. The shared traits: a girl-detective persona, new accounts with a couple hundred followers, daily posting, the same script ("I'm addicted" "why hasn't anyone heard of this game"), and fixed #detective #truecrime tags. Most videos get a few hundred to a few thousand views, with the occasional one hitting 30–650k. The Oct 20 miaonthecase video had 648k views.

This is paid UGC / creator-network marketing that relies on volume to hit a viral post, not organic word of mouth (inference, high confidence). The leader ColdTrace uses the same trick: on TikTok there are accounts like vero.detective, and on Instagram there are Reels saying "It's called ColdTrace." In this category, this approach is now standard.

The "go to playuntraced.com" lines and #ipadgames in the videos point to the second piece: the web version. iPhone and iPad users watch the video and play right in the browser, skipping App Store review and Apple's commission.

There's also a clue it may be buying ads: a Google Play review from Sep 10 opens with "I saw this game on an ad." And the mid-August wave came earlier than the TikTok network, which only started in mid-September. Where it advertises and how much can't be checked from outside (inference).

Where the money comes from: a subscription pops up around the fourth question

The store page says: free to start, "A Premium subscription unlocks every case," one subscription to unlock all cases. Non-paying players can watch rewarded ads for hints. Play lists the in-app purchase range as $1.99–$39.99.

The paywall comes early. The three most-upvoted Google Play reviews were all written in Sep 10, and they describe the same experience:

"I'm a girl who loves crime and mystery, and the ad caught my eye... the gameplay is cool, the difficulty is just right, I thought 'the perfect mystery game.' Then the Noor case got to question 4 and it wanted money before I could continue?" (119 people found this helpful)

"I'd give five stars until you answer the fourth question. After that you have to pay to play: $30, or $5 a week. Ridiculous." (36 people found this helpful)

"The second case drives me crazy: the questions and hints are misleading, answers aren't accepted unless you use one specific 'keyword' in a set of variants... and there's an ad every other question." (23 people found this helpful)

In other words: give you a taste for free, hook you, then sell a weekly or annual subscription in the middle of the first case. The average rating is still 4.4, and it's on Top Grossing charts in three English-speaking countries, which suggests people are actually paying (estimate; revenue undisclosed).

Who's competing with it: this niche is already crowded

"Going through someone's phone" is not a new mechanic. Sara Is Missing, Simulacra and A Normal Lost Phone were doing it in 2016–2017 as premium indie games, one story each. On mobile, Duskwood (2019) has 22.4M installs on Google Play, Peek a Phone (2020) 6.13M, An Elmwood Trail (2023) 7.64M. What changed in 2026 is the packaging: "cold case + phone snooping + real crime," free with subscription, and a batch of new titles showed up at once.

Untraced sits in the middle of the pack: not the earliest, not the biggest, and not the fastest-growing. Leaked - Detective Story, which only launched in October, added 100k in a week, so there is still demand in this lane. But Vietnamese casual studios are already churning out versions from the same template.

If it were you

Verdict: C. Worth studying the approach, not worth copying the product. "Phone detective" is already hot this year, driven by ColdTrace, and several Vietnamese studios are batch-producing versions on the same template and the same TikTok account network. Making an English version now means competing with a leader that localized two months ago and a crowd of fast followers, some adding 100k a week.

Good fit for: small teams that can write suspense scripts themselves and produce one or two complete cases a month, or people already building narrative or puzzle games who want a cheap cold-start playbook.

Bad fit for: anyone hoping to ship a quick reskin in English, which is exactly the most crowded slot right now. Anyone who can't write cases: each one needs hundreds of texts, photos and timelines written from scratch, and content is the real cost, not code. Anyone who can't stomach "sells well but gets hated": the revenue comes from the paywall in question 4, and the one-star reviews come from there too.

How to do it: If you must enter, don't copy the English crime version. Find the gaps neither Untraced nor ColdTrace has seriously worked: ① Change language and culture. Make the case themes local (school bullying and idol agencies in Japanese, family and disappearances in Spanish), rather than translating English cases. Accounts like rachel_detective are already posting Spanish content, so they are testing this too. ② Fix what reviewers complain about. Don't hardcode answer matching to keywords. Put the paywall after the first case is fully completed so players get to "catch the killer" once for free. Offer per-case purchases (one case for $2–5) alongside the subscription for players who won't subscribe. ③ Ship a web version from day one alongside the app.

How to get users: Follow its formula, which is the most worth copying part of this piece. Run 5–10 "XX on the case" persona accounts, each with one fixed person and voice. Post daily 15-second screen recordings with a hook line ("does anyone still remember this game", "this case scared me"), and put the web-version link right in the profile and videos. Run it for a month, see which accounts and hooks produce 100k+ hits, then move the budget onto those. The top comment is always "this scared me," so fear and voyeurism are the hooks. Shoot material in that direction.

When to move: It's already late. This packaging peaked from May, the second wave of copycats only arrived in October, and it's still growing. If you can't show at least 5 complete cases and a working account network by Q1 2027, don't bother.

Signs this read is wrong: ① If Untraced and ColdTrace install growth slows noticeably over the next month, and the October copycats never take off, the English-market demand is used up and only the language-swap route is left. ② Conversely, if a locally themed "phone detective" game breaks into a country's overall chart in a non-English market, the language and culture route is open and the opportunity is bigger than described here. ③ If TikTok starts cracking down on undisclosed persona account networks like these, this cold-start playbook stops working.