After Amino shut down: a Brazilian built a Portuguese-speaking community with "Miss Amino?"

Amino is an interest-community app that shut down in Dec 19 2025, with no announcement and no migration path for users. Crystopher Felisberto, an indie developer from Sorocaba in São Paulo state, Brazil, built a nearly identical app called Ducks. It launched on Google Play in mid-July and had 49.5k installs by November 6. From late October it sat every day in the 83–93 range of Brazil's Play social Top Grossing chart. Its features aren't better than the rest. Its edge is moving first: the Amino name, Amino's Discord link and the old Amino communities, it claimed them all early. Below: how it caught these users, where the money comes from, who is competing with it, and whether it's worth copying the approach in another language or for another shut-down platform.

Jul 1, a Vampire Diaries fan community moved house

On 2026 Jul 1, the TikTok account @thevampirediaries.ducks posted a video titled "Passo a passo de como baixar o aplicativo Ducks e entrar na TVD PT/BR" (step-by-step guide to downloading the Ducks app and joining the Portuguese-language TVD community): step one, tap this Play Store link; step two, sign up; step three, search for the community name. The account used to be a US-TV fan community on Amino. After Amino shut down, they renamed it on TikTok and swapped the "Amino" suffix for "ducks." On Aug 22 it posted again: "É OFICIAL!!! O APLICATIVO DUCKS SERÁ LANÇADO EM 23/08/2026!" (Official!!! The Ducks app launches on 23 Aug!)

These videos don't get many views, a few thousand or a few hundred, but they all do the same thing: the original community admins bring the whole group over. On TikTok you can also find BTS and Demon Slayer fan community accounts that renamed themselves the same way. One Aug 6 video says: "Ducks made a new Amino, a better version, with pets that have streak flames like the chat streaks."

What it is

Ducks is Amino's shape: interest-based communities with feeds, blogs, collaboratively edited wikis, group chats, voice rooms and live streams. Each user has levels, points, daily check-ins and achievements, and can buy avatar frames and chat bubbles. The store subtitle reads "O aplicativo de comunidades 100% brasileiro" (the 100% Brazilian community app). On Play it's rated 14+, and the user base skews toward teens.

Old users barely need to learn anything. One Aug 24 Play review says "App ótimo! bem familiar para mim" (Great app, very familiar to me). A Sep 10 review says "até um pouco melhor que o amino" (even a bit better than Amino), but then: "but there are too many bugs, lag and updates, and calls sometimes won't open."

Where users come from: claim Amino's name and entry points first

Search capture. Early on, its name in the stores and Facebook groups was "Ducks - Comunidades de Amino", and the APKPure page for the package still lives at amino-ducks-comunidades. In June it opened pre-registration on X, with the copy opening "Você sente falta do Amino?" (Do you miss Amino?). The official Discord invite in the Instagram pre-registration post was discord.gg/amino, so anyone looking for Amino on Discord found Ducks. Once established, the store name changed to the neutral "Ducks App - Communities & Chat", and Amino no longer appears in the description.

Pre-registration + early access. In June pre-registration opened, and the official Spanish account @ducks.app.es has posted "#Amino #MuyPronto" (coming very soon) since Jun 12. In Jul 16 early access opened on Play; third-party daily install estimates show about 7,000 within 5 days of launch, over a thousand a day in the first week. That's the pre-registered users converting in a batch. In the week of the Aug 23 "official launch", the estimated daily count jumped 4,400 times. The most-viewed third-party TikTok video is from Jul 3: "AMINO ESTÁ DE REGRESO PERO MUCHO MEJOR EN LA APP DE DUCK" (Amino is back, but much better in the Duck app), with 13k views.

Community leaders. Its website credits list 23 people, 1 developers, and the rest are admins and moderators, mostly from the original Amino communities. Giving former admins a role and letting them bring their entire community and roleplay group over is worth more than any feature.

No paid acquisition seen. After September the install curve flattened to 250–450 a day, with no paid-campaign spikes; over the last 7 days, 2,536 new installs (Google Play installs, 11-06). One caveat: an r/amino Reddit thread titled "Apps Impersonating Other Apps" names Ducks as "showing up everywhere lately, with a lot of alt accounts promoting it, caught by spam filters." The full post isn't accessible, only the summary; unverified.

Where the money comes from: copy Amino+, then collect "support" off-store

The app has ads and in-app purchases from $0.99–$47.99: in-app currency Quack, avatar frames, chat bubbles, community promotion slots, and the Ducks+ membership (including diary cloud backup). This is the model Amino validated years ago.

There is also an off-store "Support us" page (duckapps.com.br/apoie, 11-06) labeled "100% optional", with three monthly subscription tiers: about $8.23 gets an exclusive avatar frame, one community promotion a month and a Discord role; about $22 adds chat bubbles and VIP support; about $274 is a brand tier listing "in-app ad placement" and "direct contact with the developer." There's also a one-time donation starting at R$15. Collecting money off-store avoids the store cut and relies on the "help this project survive" sentiment.

How much could it earn? The 80–90 spot on Brazil's Play social Top Grossing chart has a low bar; near 90 on the same chart sits an established Brazilian community app with 4.53M installs. We estimate monthly revenue in the several-thousand-dollar range (inferred, unverified). That's enough to live on as an individual, not enough for a company.

On the Play store page 11-06 shows 745 ratings and 4.6 stars. The one-star reviews cluster around bugs: the keyboard disappears, the back button exits the app outright, calls won't open. The developer is shipping fast, though. In the Oct 28 update they added dozens of things, including letters, a diary, a "cinema" for watching shows together, weekly tasks, and per-person volume control during calls.

Who's competing for it: an "Amino successor" in every language

Scale figures come from each app's Play page and website, 2026 through 3 November.

These products have nearly identical features, all cloning Amino. KarboAI's site copy and Ducks' site ('Find your community / Build your space', 'Chat and voice', 'Create') look like they came from the same template. The real dividing line is language: English went to Kyodo, Russian and Arabic to KarboAI, Portuguese to Ducks. Ducks wasn't the first or the biggest, just the earliest in Portuguese and the most aggressive about shouting it. Brazil was one of Amino's biggest markets back then, so this is the juiciest and emptiest slice.

Few people outside know of it: no media coverage, revenue undisclosed, no big X accounts mention it. Discussion lives only on r/amino, in Portuguese and Spanish TikTok alt accounts, and in rivals tagging each other.

If it were you

C: This fight is mostly over. What's worth learning is the playbook, not this product. Amino has been down for 11 months. English, Russian, Arabic and Portuguese all have successors, and the scattered communities have already found new homes. Building another Amino clone now means going after people who have already settled, with a heavy product and revenue of only a few thousand dollars a month.

Who it suits: veteran moderators of a fandom or roleplay scene in some language, with a few communities they can bring over; or people watching for 'the next platform to shut down' who can launch within weeks of the shutdown news.

Who it's not for: anyone without community ties who's counting on features to win (features here are all the same); anyone who doesn't want to handle content moderation and underage users (14+, voice rooms, DMs; one incident and you're delisted); anyone aiming for a real business (this niche only supports one or two people per language).

How to do it: if you still want to be an Amino successor, only languages nobody has claimed are worth looking at, such as Indonesian, Turkish, or French former-Amino communities (first search TikTok and Discord for '<language> + Amino' to see if anyone holds it). Copy Amino's features directly, no innovation. The better takeaway is to keep this playbook for next time: when a platform with many non-English users or a community tool announces shutdown, launch a replacement in the local language within weeks. Monetize by copying the original platform's cosmetics and memberships, plus an off-platform 'support' subscription.

How to get users: piggyback on the original platform's name for traffic. Put it in waitlist copy, Discord invite links, and early store names, then switch to a neutral name once established to reduce takedown risk. Don't recruit random users; go after the original community's moderators, give them admin roles and mod slots, and have them post 'step-by-step guide to moving over' videos on TikTok. Open a waitlist first, collect enough sign-ups, then launch so first-week installs burst together.

When to move, before what: the replacement window is 3–6 months after shutdown. Ducks opened its waitlist about 6 months after shutdown, which is already late, and succeeded only because nobody was seriously doing Portuguese. When the next platform announces shutdown, have a waitlist page live within a month.

What would show this read is wrong: ① Ducks' Play installs stay above 2027 per day into early 300 and its Top Grossing rank keeps climbing, meaning these communities retain well once moved and cloning deserved to be done earlier and more seriously; ② MediaLab actually launches an official 'Amino 2.0', or Kyodo ships a Portuguese version, meaning the successor business's moat was just 'arriving first' and will scatter under pressure; ③ someone builds an Amino successor in Indonesian or Turkish and it takes off on TikTok, meaning there's still room and the playbook is directly reusable.