The night of the downpour, a journalist said "It's called Amaru, and it warns you when rain will flood": how a Spanish-language flood-map app hit #1 in Ecuador in eight days
What it is A Spanish-language map of rainfall, rivers, and flood risk across South America. It combines public rainfall data, river forecasts, radar, and citizen reports into a four-color risk level with reasons attached. It pushes alerts for saved locations when risk appears. It's free and requires no sign-up.
Why it took off During El Niño, Guayaquil had two heavy-rain events in a row. Officials admitted there were no hour-level warnings. The app was already live and the pitch was simple: "tells you where it will flood." Journalists posted it on TikTok, mainstream media covered it, and local news accounts cited its rainfall and lightning data directly. Two downpours, two install spikes.
BHow you could follow it Go to a country that has floods every year, lacks hour-level official warnings, and doesn't speak English (such as Indonesia, the Philippines, or Central America). Launch a few months before the rainy season, publish local rainfall figures every day that news outlets can quote directly, let local media distribute it for you, then sell an institutional version to media and businesses.
- Data (updated daily) · first launch 2026-09-24 · 11-07 installs 31,582
Android · Total installs worldwide Data 2026-10-29 → 2026-11-07 (10 days, 10 observations). Google's detail page only refreshes install counts every other day, so a flat day doesn't mean nobody installed.
A small outsourced-software company in Guayaquil built a free "where will it flood" map app just before the El Niño rainy season. After a downpour in Oct 26, a journalist posted it to TikTok. The next day several major local outlets wrote about it, it climbed to #1 on Ecuador's iOS free chart, and Google Play installs rose from 655 to 32k over eight days. No ad spend. The raw material is all public data, and a few people could build it. The hard part was launching before the disaster season hit, and so far it's still unclear how it makes money.
The video from the night of the downpour
In Oct 26 of 2026, a downpour hit Guayaquil in the afternoon: 1 people died, 100 districts flooded, and many drivers were trapped in standing water (Ecuavisa, 10-27). Around 9 p.m. local time that night, journalist Jefferson Merchán (TikTok @jeffersonmerchant, 209k followers) posted a 83-second video with one line of caption: "Pilas, se llama Amaru y te avisa de las lluvias e inundaciones. Esto nos servirá mucho en Guayaquil." (Heads up, it's called Amaru and it warns you about rain and flooding. This will be very useful in Guayaquil.)
As of early November the video had 70k views and 2,444 likes, with 2,528 shares, more than the likes (TikTok, 11-06). People weren't just liking it, they were sending it to family. The comments were raw. The top-liked one (30 likes) said "This app is useless, all of Guayaquil floods anyway." Another said "I already follow its forecasts on X, they're really accurate. This should be the job of the risk management agency, and an outsider is doing it instead." Several others said they couldn't find it by searching Google Play and had to go through the website to download it.
The next day, Extra, Primicias, and Ecuavisa all wrote about it on the same day. Ecuavisa's headline was "Amaru and three other tools that warn you about flooding," and its lead quoted Álex Anchundia, manager of Guayaquil risk management firm Segura EP, on TV: the city has no tool that can judge downpour intensity hours ahead, only the coarse three-to-four-day forecasts from the national meteorology and hydrology institute. The gap officials themselves admitted is the reason Amaru got covered.
What it is
A map of rainfall, rivers, and flood risk across South America, in Spanish, free, no sign-up. The homepage's main headline reads "No es una app del clima" (this is not a weather app). It doesn't report temperature. It reports "where it will flood."
- Tap any point on the map and get a 0–100 risk index, in four levels (green, yellow, orange, red). Every level comes with the "why": how much rain has fallen, whether nearby rivers are rising, the terrain's elevation, and whether anyone has reported flooding.
- "Mi zona": watches your home, office, and kids' school, and only pushes an alert once risk reaches orange. From 10 PM to 6 AM it only pushes red.
- Citizens report flooding, road closures, and landslides with photos. Other users confirm the reports, and AI cross-checks them before weighting.
- Before you head out, check the whole route, and ask the AI in Spanish "can I go out tomorrow?" Compare against rainfall from the 1997–98 El Niño.
All the data is public: Google's river flood forecasts, the Open-Meteo weather forecast, RainViewer radar, and OpenStreetMap. The AI is Claude. The website says "no single signal can trigger a high-level alert on its own; several have to agree." It covers 13 countries, 236 cities, and 850 river gauge stations (self-reported).
It's built by Bonsai Digital Development. Its parent, bonsai.com.ec, says it has been doing custom software, apps, and AI agents in Ecuador and the US since 2010, and lists Amaru as an "in-house product" in its portfolio. The iOS seller is Fertileno S.A., another company in Guayaquil. I couldn't find out how the two are related, or who the founder is.
The numbers: two storms, two peaks
| Date | Google Play cumulative installs | iOS Ecuador free overall chart |
|---|---|---|
| 10-28 ~ 10-30 | 655 (Play install counts lag) | #1 |
| 10-31 | 7,570 | #2 |
| 11-01 | 7,570 | #9 |
| 11-02 | 27,852 | #33 |
| 11-03 | 27,852 | #1 |
| 11-05 | 28,921 | #5 |
| 11-06 | 31,582 | #29 |
Source: Google Play installs and the App Store Ecuador charts, logged daily. During this period the iOS weather category sat at #1; it ranked #12 in Peru's weather chart and #66 in Mexico's.
The second peak came from the second storm, which hit on the night of Nov 1 and into the early hours of Nov 2. Third-party daily install estimates: about 9,000 times a day for two days after the storm, dropping to around 500 a day once the rain stopped. Heavy rain hit Santa Elena province again in Nov 4, and installs climbed back to 2,600. The curve is basically a rainfall chart. The iOS Ecuador storefront has only 22 ratings, and Play has none yet, so retention and DAU aren't visible from outside.
It didn't appear out of nowhere. It launched on iOS in Aug 20, Play followed in Sep 24, and the X account @amarualertas had been posting daily forecasts well before the storms. When the rain came, it was the ready-made answer people could find and use right away.
Where users came from: the media did the distribution for it
Journalists and creators shared it on their own. Besides Jefferson Merchán's post, @oilub_ec framed it around "don't let your car get flooded" (10-28), and @mandante.ec presented it alongside Google Flood Hub (11-04). I found no sign of paid partnerships.
Mainstream outlets covered it as public-service news. Extra, Primicias, and Ecuavisa ran stories the same day 10-27; Expresa, Radio Centro, and La Prensa followed (10-31). Extra's piece explained what each of the four colors means and when alerts go out, reading almost like a product manual.
Turn yourself into a news source. This is the move worth copying most. Its X account posts lines outlets can lift word for word, like the Oct 27 post: "Guayaquil: 18 to 22 mm (strong), mostly overnight and in the early morning. Peak 19:36, with a spring tide... median of 8 models." Ecuavisa embedded the tweet directly in its article. By the second storm on Nov 1, local news accounts were using it as their source: Corte Informa and Contraluz wrote "Amaru reports 30 lightning strikes in 404 minutes," KCH Radio broadcast "nearly 290 lightning strikes in 30 minutes," and Radio Centro 11-04 wrote "according to Amaru, Santa Elena..." (TikTok, 11-01 to 11-04). Every one of those is free advertising, and the media brought it to them.
Paid acquisition: none found. The app takes no money inside it, so there's no payback path that would justify paid ads (inference).
Who it's competing with
| Competitors | What it is | How Amaru differs |
|---|---|---|
| Google Flood Hub, flood alerts in Search and Maps | Big-company features | Covers only river floods, not urban flooding, live rainfall, or citizen reports. Amaru uses its data as raw input. |
| Ecuador's INAMHI meteorological and hydrological institute, ECU 911 | Official | Authoritative, but only rough 3–4 day forecasts. ECU 911 is an alert tool. |
| Windy, Meteored, AccuWeather | General weather apps with tens of millions to hundreds of millions of Play installs | They tell you how much rain is coming, not whether your house will flood |
| METEOPAINT CLIMA | A paid weather-animation app launched in 10-21; #2 on the iOS Ecuador weather chart (11-06) | Emerged in the same El Niño wave; leans into the weather-enthusiast crowd |
| Alertaniño | A web page launched by Peruvian TV channel Latina in 11-04 | Checks risk by district using static official data. No live data or push alerts. |
In South America, I found no second product that combines rainfall, rivers, terrain, tides, and citizen reports into a risk level with stated reasons, explains it in plain Spanish, and pushes alerts for saved locations. Outside Ecuador, no English-language media, tech press, or Product Hunt has mentioned it, and I found no copycats.
Where the money comes from: not clear yet
The app is free. The money is supposed to come from an "institutional" version on the website: an alert card you can embed in a web page, plus an API that returns a risk index for given coordinates.
| Plan | Pricing | Audience |
|---|---|---|
| Dev | Free, 200 calls per month, with Amaru branding | For developer trials |
| Medios | $79/month, 25k calls, no branding | Newspapers, radio, TV stations |
| Empresa | $299/month, 250k calls, with webhooks | Insurance, agriculture, logistics |
| Institucional | Contact sales | Municipalities, governments, NGOs |
Source: amaruapp.com/organizaciones, 11-06; payment via PayPal.
The logic holds together: media already cite its data for free, so the next step is turning those outlets into paying customers. But whether anyone actually pays isn't visible from outside. There's counter-evidence too: Peruvian TV channel Latina chose to build its own web page for the same purpose instead of buying Amaru's cards.
If it were you
B. Worth a try: the playbook is clear, but it has to launch before the disaster season, and where the money comes from is still unproven. This is a "get in early and wait for the storms" product. The technical barrier is low; what decides success is launch timing, localization, and relationships with the media.
Who it suits: a team of 1–3 people, where one person can build a mobile app with maps and another is a local who speaks the language and knows local journalists or makes local content. The target country should have floods every year, no official hourly warning system, and a non-English language, for example Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Bangladesh, or Central America and Mexico, which Amaru doesn't yet cover (inference; I did not check each country for existing equivalents).
Who it doesn't suit: anyone who wants to go head-to-head with Amaru in South America (it already covers 13 countries and has reached the top 15 of Peru's weather chart); anyone hoping to earn through in-app purchases or subscriptions (charging during a disaster gets you roasted, and the first question in the reviews is "do you charge?"); anyone who can't wait several months and needs steady daily installs (once the rain stops, daily installs fall to about a twentieth of their rainy-day level).
How to build it: copy the model, but localize it much more thoroughly. Combine Open-Meteo forecasts, Google's river flood forecasts, radar, and terrain into a risk grade, and spell out the "why" at every level. Watch saved locations and push alerts with restraint (orange and above only, red-only at night). Citizen reports should require a photo and a location. On Google Play, put the search terms locals actually use in the store name (Amaru's is "alertas de lluvia," roughly "rain alerts"). Also avoid its mistake: a newly listed app can't be found in Play search during a disaster, so list it months ahead and build up search ranking.
How to get users: the main engine isn't paid ads, it's letting media distribute for you. Set up an X / Facebook / TikTok account before the season and post a sentence every day that can be lifted straight into a news story: which city, how many millimeters, when the peak hits, when the spring tide comes, how many lightning strikes. On the night of a storm, post a screenshot of "what color your area is right now" immediately, and send it proactively to local reporters and news accounts. Give the institutional cards free to local media first, so that "according to XX" appears in their stories, and only then talk about charging.
How far ahead: check the local rainy season. Indonesia's peak rains run from December to February, so you'd need to be listed by early December. The Philippines and Vietnam's typhoon seasons start in June of 2027, which gives you half a year to get solid (inference, based on typical seasonal patterns).
Signs you've got it wrong: ① Amaru's El Niño season ends in March 2027, its iOS rating is still under a couple hundred, and its website shows no media or corporate clients. That would mean this kind of product only gets disaster-driven traffic, keeps no users, and brings in no money. ② Google builds urban flooding and saved-location alerts into Google Maps, and the gap closes. ③ Your target country's government launches an hourly, coordinate-based warning app. ④ The reverse: Amaru's website starts listing paying media or insurance clients, or it hits the overall chart during a storm in Peru or Colombia as it did in Ecuador. That would mean the model can be copied across countries, so move fast to claim the markets nobody has taken yet.
Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report
- Competitors
Name Where Launched Scale How it differs from this one Google Flood Hub (including flood alerts in Search and Maps) Big-company features Covering Latin America since around 2022 80+ countries worldwide (unverified) Covers only river floods, not urban flooding, live rain, or citizen reports, and there is no local Spanish-language app. Amaru uses its data as raw input. INAMHI / alertasecuador.gob.ec / ECU 911 App Other Years national, official Only 3–4 day rough forecasts, and officially admits there's no hourly tool. The ECU 911 app is an alert tool. Windy / Meteored / AccuWeather / The Weather Channel iOS 2008–2016 Hundreds of millions of installs (Meteored 81.9M on Play, AccuWeather 131M) General weather apps. They tell you how much rain is coming, not whether you'll flood, and they have no localized risk grading for Ecuador. METEOPAINT CLIMA iOS 2026-10-21 #2 on the iOS Ecuador weather chart A paid weather-animation map run from a Facebook weather page, aimed at weather enthusiasts, not flood risk Clima: radar de lluvia(Deep Orbit) iOS 2026-08-11 #7 on the iOS Ecuador weather chart A general rain radar from a Dutch studio, not localized Alertaniño(Latina Noticias) Web 2026-11-04 Promoted by a Peruvian TV channel, reach unknown Checks risk by district using static official data. No live data or push alerts. - Where users come from
- Verified TikTok journalist/creator organic mentions: Jefferson Merchán (209K-follower journalist) 10-27 video views 70,684, shares 2,528; @oilub_ec, @oranji.ai, @mandante.ec followed up (TikHub)
- Verified Coverage by mainstream local outlets: Extra, Primicias, and Ecuavisa covered it the same day 10-27; Expresa, Radio Centro, and La Prensa followed (10-31)
- Verified Cited as a news data source + its own X account: 11-02–04 outlets, including Corte Informa, Contraluz, KCH Radio and Radio Centro, attribute rain and lightning data to Amaru. @amarualertas posts daily city rainfall forecasts, and Ecuavisa embedded one of its tweets.
- Verified User word of mouth (IG/FB/X/WhatsApp): a personal post saying "Bájense el app de @amarualertas" (download the app). On TikTok, shares exceed likes.
- Inferred Store search and charts: on iOS in Ecuador it reached #1 on the overall Top Free chart, which gave it a second wave of exposure. The name itself carries the keyword "alertas de lluvia" (rain alerts).
- Inferred Paid acquisition: none found. The app charges nothing, so there is no payback path that would justify paid ads.
amaru: alertas de lluvia (ec.bonsai.amaru) research report
Research date: 2026-11-06. Data sources: our googleplay and appstore databases (agent-im server), Jina web search and page extraction, TikHub TikTok search, iTunes lookup. Our Play database does not include the Ecuador storefront, so Ecuador rankings come only from the App Store database.
One line
Amaru is a Spanish-language "rainfall / river / waterlogging risk map" built by Bonsai, a small outsourcing software company in Guayaquil, Ecuador, that has been building software since 2010. It combines public data such as Google Flood Forecasting, Open-Meteo and RainViewer, plus citizen reports, into a 0–100 risk index shown in four colors. In 2026, El Niño was underway, and on October 26 and November 1–2 Guayaquil saw back-to-back heavy-rain floods. Within hours of the flooding, a journalist with 200k followers posted it on TikTok. The next day several major Ecuadorian outlets covered it, and it climbed to #1 on the iOS Ecuador Top Free overall chart. Its Play installs went from 655 to 31,582 over 8 days. It broke out through a natural disaster plus organic social and media spread, not paid acquisition. The product filled a gap at exactly the moment of the disaster: officials said they had no tool precise to the hour, and Amaru positioned itself as "not a weather app, but a waterlogging impact map," a differentiation that made people share it. It also made itself a data source for the media. Radio stations and news accounts wrote "según Amaru…" (according to Amaru), so when the next storm hit, it got another wave of attention.
1. Who they are
- Play developer: Bonsai Digital Development, website amaruapp.com, email [email protected] [googleplay database, app table]. The parent company is bonsai.com.ec: "Desde 2010, en Ecuador y EE. UU." It builds AI agents, custom software and apps, and lists Amaru as "producto propio" (its own product) in its portfolio. The same company also built StudioFútbol and Kulto [bonsai.com.ec].
- The iOS seller is Fertileno S.A, a Guayaquil company founded in 2012 (RUC 0992758953001) and registered for computer wholesale. It also has a field-work app called "Cheky" [apps.apple.com/ec/developer/fertileno-s-a/id698191517; datacil.com]. This is presumably a related entity or client of Bonsai, unverified.
- Listings: iOS 2026-08-20 (id6798024281), Play 2026-09-24 [iTunes lookup; googleplay database]. That means it had been live for two months before the first big storm, and the team had already opened the X account @amarualertas and was posting forecasts.
- Product [amaruapp.com, /info.php, /soporte.php, Play listing]:
- Risk map: live rainfall, radar, river gauges, citizen reports, by city. The website says it covers 13 countries, 236 cities and 850 river gauges.
- "Mi zona": it computes local risk after you share your location. You can follow a few points such as home, school or warehouse, and it only pushes alerts at "Alerta" level or above. At night it only pushes "Peligro" level, and the same alert is not repeated within 6 hours.
- Citizen reports (with photo and location): weighted by whether others confirm them, and checked with AI. The website says there were 30 reports in the last 38,790 days (a self-reported figure).
- Route alerts, asking AI questions in Spanish (the site lists Claude/Anthropic), El Niño 1997-98 historical comparison, tides.
- Free, no sign-up required. The latest version added a desktop widget and a "share my area" image [googleplay database, recent_changes].
- Monetization (not in the app, on the website at /organizaciones) [amaruapp.com/organizaciones]: Widget + API. Dev is free (200 API calls per month). Medios costs $79 per month (for newspapers, radio and TV). Empresa costs $299 per month (for insurance, agriculture and logistics, with webhooks and El Niño history). Institucional is priced on request (municipalities, governments, NGOs). Payment is via PayPal. It is not known whether anyone is paying.
2. Growth data
Play (googleplay database, cumulative global installs):
| Date | Installs | increase |
|---|---|---|
| 10-29 / 10-30 | 655 | 0 (Play's counts lag) |
| 10-31 | 7,570 | +6,915 |
| 11-02 | 27,852 | +20,282 |
| 11-05 | 28,921 | +1,069 |
| 11-06 | 31,582 | +2,661 |
Estimated daily install growth from AppstoreSpy [googleplay database, app_day_ext]: 10-29–31 at about 2,300 per day; 11-01–02 at about 9,300 per day; 11-03 at about 1,700; 11-04–05 at about 530 per day; 11-06 at about 2,660 (11-04: Santa Elena province had another heavy rain). No rating data.
iOS Ecuador (appstore database, app_day, cc=ec):
| Date | Free overall chart | Weather category | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10-28 ~ 10-30 | #1 | #1 | 3 → 13 |
| 10-31 | #2 | #1 | 16 |
| 11-01 | #9 | #1 | 16 |
| 11-02 | #33 | #1 | 17 |
| 11-03 | #1 | #1 | 18 |
| 11-04 / 11-05 | #5 | #1 | 20 |
| 11-06 | #29 | #1 | 22 |
On iOS it also briefly entered weather charts in other countries: Peru #12, Mexico #66, Uruguay #68, United States #88 [appstore database, app_profile].
The weather free-chart ranks shown in the Play data card for hk/ng/ae/sg/us (#10-29–20 at 24, then sliding to #60–180 afterward) are most likely a by-product of the aggregated regional charts. Installs were rising in those days while those countries' ranks fell, which does not match real demand in Ecuador. They cannot be used to prove users in those countries.
Two peaks, two rainstorms: 10-26 Guayaquil storm (1 dead, 100 districts flooded) [ecuavisa.com 10-27]; 11-01 late 11-02 into early morning, another storm, about 260 L/m² of rain overnight, northern areas like Las Orquídeas flooded [TikTok @planetaintriga, @corteinforma 11-02/03].
3. How users came in (growth tactics)
- Journalists and creators posted spontaneously on TikTok (confirmed): Jefferson Merchán (@jeffersonmerchant, bio "Periodista", 209k followers) posted "Pilas se llama Amaru y te avisa de las lluvias e inundaciones" on 10-27. It got 70,684 views and 2,444 likes, and 2,528 shares (more shares than likes, suggesting it was forwarded as life-saving information on WhatsApp and elsewhere) [TikHub]. Smaller accounts followed up: @oilub_ec (10-28, framed around "don't let your car get flooded"), @oranji.ai (11-02, about rivers), and @mandante.ec (11-04, introducing Amaru alongside Google Flood Hub).
- Mainstream media coverage clustered (confirmed): 10-27 Extra.ec, Primicias and Ecuavisa ("Amaru y otras tres herramientas", with an @amarualertas tweet embedded in the article) covered it the same day. Expresa, Radio Centro (Facebook video "Una alerta a tiempo puede evitar una tragedia") and Instagram news accounts ("se viralizó en Ecuador") followed, and La Prensa wrote another piece on 10-31. Ecuavisa's report also included key context: the manager of Guayaquil's risk management company Segura EP admitted on TV that the city had no tool to judge rainfall intensity hours in advance, and INAMHI could only give rough forecasts 3–4 days out. That gap is where Amaru stepped in.
- 自己变成新闻源(已确认):第二场暴雨时,地方新闻号直接拿 Amaru 的数据当消息来源,比如 Corte Informa、Contraluz 写的「La plataforma meteorológica Amaru reportó 404 rayos en 30 minutos」,KCH Radio 11-02 的视频,Radio Centro 11-04 的「Según Amaru…」(圣埃伦娜 Valdivia 被淹)[TikHub]。X 账号 @amarualertas 每天发「8 个模型中位数」的城市雨量预报,外加潮汐和「aguaje」(大潮)提醒,方便媒体直接引用 [ecuavisa 嵌入的推文]。卖给媒体的 Widget 套餐也是同一个思路。
- User word of mouth: on Instagram and Facebook, personal posts say "Bájense el app de @amarualertas" (download the app), and on X someone called it "la mejor app compañera de viaje" (the best travel companion app) [Jina search results].
- Store search and charts: after the disaster, people searched "lluvia" and "inundaciones" in Ecuador, and its name (alertas de lluvia) matched those terms. After reaching #1 on the iOS overall free chart, the chart placement itself brought more exposure.
- Paid acquisition: no evidence found. Ad libraries were not checked (Meta and TikTok ad libraries only track listed products, and the TikTok ad library only covers Europe). The app charges nothing in-app, so there is no payback path to support paid ads. Judged as no paid acquisition, unverified.
4. Competitors
| Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs from Amaru |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Google Flood Hub (flood alerts within Google Search and Maps) | Big-company features / web | Covering Latin America since around 2022 | Global 80 countries (Google public data, unverified) | Covers only river flood forecasts, not urban waterlogging, live rainfall or citizen reports. There is no Spanish-language app that lets you follow a few locations and receive push alerts. Amaru uses its river data as raw input. |
| INAMHI / alertasecuador.gob.ec / ECU 911 App | Official (website, app) | Years | Nationwide | Authoritative, but only rough forecasts 3–4 days out. The ECU 911 app is for alerts. No risk score by coordinates. |
| Windy, Meteored, AccuWeather, The Weather Channel | iOS / Android | 2008–2016 | Hundreds of millions of installs (Meteored on Play 81.9M, AccuWeather 131M, googleplay database) | General weather apps that answer "how much rain will fall," not "will my house flood." The interfaces are professional, and Ecuador has no localized risk grading. |
| METEOPAINT CLIMA | iOS (Android reportedly coming soon) | 2026-10-21 | iOS Ecuador weather chart #2 (appstore database 11-06) | A weather-animation map app built by the Facebook weather page "Alertas y Curiosidades", with a 7-day trial and paid plans. It targets weather enthusiasts rather than waterlogging risk, and it is chasing the same El Niño wave as Amaru. |
| Clima: radar de lluvia(Deep Orbit B.V.) | iOS | 2026-08-11 | #7 on the iOS Ecuador weather chart | A general rain-radar app from a Dutch studio, not localized |
| Alertaniño(Latina Noticias) | Website (Peru) | 2026-11-04 | Promoted by a TV station, scale unknown | A Peruvian TV station uses static risk data from the official Cenepred agency and looks up risk levels by district. It has no live rainfall and no push alerts. This shows Latin American media building their own tools of this kind instead of buying Amaru's widget. |
| RiverApp, Hazardon, アメミル and similar | Android | 2012–2013 | 100k–550k installs (googleplay database) | Similar water-level and heavy-rain disaster prevention apps from other countries, not covering South America |
Conclusion: in South America, I found no earlier app that combines rainfall, rivers, terrain, tides and citizen reports into a single risk score, explains it in plain Spanish, and sends push alerts for locations you follow. The big players (Google) have the raw ingredients but have not built a consumer product from them.
5. Why it took off
- The disaster lined up perfectly: 2026 El Niño is underway, Ecuador issued a national red alert, and October coastal rainfall ran well above normal (Primicias reported local spikes of 4,564%) [agricultura.gob.ec, primicias.ec]. 10-26 and 11-01 were two heavy rain events that sent demand up sharply. Each install peak lines up with one of the two storms.
- It was already in place: the iOS version launched in August, the X account was posting forecasts, and the product was already working. On the day of the disaster, it was the ready-made answer anyone could find with a search.
- The official gap was publicly acknowledged: Guayaquil's risk management department said on TV that it had no tool that could pinpoint conditions by the hour, and the press promptly wrote up Amaru as the stopgap [ecuavisa].
- The product framing invited sharing: "No es una app del clima", it tells you "where will flood"; a four-color risk scale with a "why" makes it readable without knowing meteorology; it's free with no sign-up; and alerts are restrained (push only at Alerta and above). During a disaster, the people who share it (reporters, drivers, parents) can explain it in one sentence.
- It became a data source on its own: it published daily city rainfall and lightning numbers that media could cite directly, which is why it kept getting mentioned during the second storm.
- Limits: demand is strong only during heavy rain; daily installs fall back to around 500 between peaks. Whether it keeps users depends on whether push alerts and the home-screen widget keep people installed. El Niño is expected to last until 2027 March [infobae 10-21], so there should be several more peaks this rainy season.
6. Differentiation, and whether that's why it broke out
Its differentiation comes down to three things:
- Moved from "weather" to "impact": no temperatures, just "will this place flood", with a reason attached to each of the four risk levels;
- Multiple sources in one, plus localization: Google river forecasts, rainfall, radar, terrain, tides and citizen reports cross-check each other, so no single signal alone can trigger a high-level alert; everything is in plain Spanish, and it understands local context like aguaje (spring tides) and El Niño;
- Citizen reports and watch-area push alerts turn it from a "look at the map" tool into one that "keeps an eye on my home for me."
That explains the growth, but only as a necessary condition. The real trigger was the disaster and the press. Among a pile of generic weather apps, it was the only one that could say in one line "we tell you where will flood," so reporters and media picked it, and that framing is what made it citable as a news source. The underlying data is all public (Open-Meteo, Google Flood), so the technical barrier is low; the moat is localization, getting there first, the citizen-report data built up over time, and media relationships.
7. Visibility and copycats
- It was widely covered in Ecuador (Extra, Primicias, Ecuavisa, La Prensa, Expresa, Radio Centro), but always as public-service news. Outside Ecuador, no English-language media, X tech circles or Product Hunt mentioned it (x-radar local corpus searches for "amarualertas" and "amaru app" returned nothing). Revenue is not public, and it's unknown whether anyone bought the B2B plan.
- Copycats: none found that directly copied it. Peru's Latina Noticias launched Alertaniño 11-04, a media-built version of the same idea (static risk, no app). MeteoPaint is a weather app that surfaced during the same El Niño wave, not a copy.
8. What others can learn
- The "pre-position for disaster season" playbook: build a localized risk app and social accounts before a foreseeable disaster season (El Niño, typhoon season, rainy season) arrives. When the disaster hits, media and reporters distribute it for free. Markets with frequent flooding and thin official tools, such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Peru and Colombia, can copy this directly.
- Public data (Open-Meteo, Google Flood Hub API, RainViewer) plus an LLM for explanations lets a few people build it; differentiation is in "plain language, a clear verdict, the reasons, and few interruptions."
- Become a data source for the media (publish daily numbers they can cite directly) while selling a widget/API to media, turning "being covered" into a B2B channel.
- Caveat: traffic arrives fast and leaves fast, so push alerts and widgets are needed to keep users.
9. Uncertain
- Retention and DAU are unknown; Play has no rating data; the iOS Ecuador store has only 22 ratings.
- Whether the B2B plan has any paying customers is unknown; the 38,790 reports are self-reported figures on the website.
- The relationship between Fertileno S.A and Bonsai, and who the founders are, could not be found.
- Ad spend was not verified (not found in ad libraries, which doesn't mean none was run).
- Its Play chart ranking in Ecuador is not in our database.
Sources
- Play store page play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ec.bonsai.amaru; iOS apps.apple.com/app/amaru-alertas-de-lluvia/id6798024281
- amaruapp.com/, /info.php, /soporte.php, /organizaciones, /api-docs.php
- bonsai.com.ec/
- Ecuavisa 2026-10-27 www.ecuavisa.com/ecuador/amaru-herramientas-clima-lluvias-in…
- Extra 2026-10-27 www.extra.ec/noticia/ecuador/amaru-asi-funciona-aplicacion-m…
- Primicias 2026-10-27 www.primicias.ec/ciencia-tecnologia/lluvias-inundaciones-ecu…
- La Prensa 2026-10-31 laprensa.com.ec/amaru-appconsultar-riesgo-inundaciones-tiemp…
- TikTok www.tiktok.com/@jeffersonmerchant/video/7701160238417956116 (TikHub data)
- Radio Centro Facebook, Expresa Facebook, Instagram www.instagram.com/p/DfC08B1khOs/
- Alertaniño alertanino.latinanoticias.pe/ ;MeteoPaint apptopia.com/ios/app/6821247678/about
- El Niño background: www.agricultura.gob.ec/estado-del-evento-el-nino/, www.infobae.com/america/america-latina/2026/10/21/el-nino-po…
- Our database: googleplay (app, app_snap, app_day_ext, chart_rank), appstore (app_profile, app_day, v_chart), data as of 2026-11-06