"She Says She's Busy, Yet She's Always Online": a WhatsApp online-tracking app got 90,000 installs in two months, but this street is already crowded

A Hong Kong mass-install studio listed an app called Last Seen, Online Tracker in September 10. It tells you when a given WhatsApp contact was online and for how long. By November 6 it had 91k installs and had reached the tools top-grossing charts in Nigeria, South Africa and India. It has nothing new: it copies a category that has existed for years and buys installs with one emotional ad and a few cheap markets. Below: how it took off, where the money comes from, who it's competing with, and why you most likely shouldn't get in.

A 23-second video

On the morning of September 2026 16, six days after launch, a Facebook page called "Online Status Tracker" posted a 23-second vertical video. The page had 29 followers and an unrelated bio, "Hi there, want more beer?", so it looks like an old 2023-year-old page repurposed. The post caption was one line:

📲Want to know her (or his) online status? Follow now!

The video had an "Install now" button that linked straight to the app's Google Play page. The voiceover opened: "Kept telling me she was too busy to reply to my texts. So I showed her this. If your girlfriend is suddenly hiding her online status…" In October 27, the same page posted another button-linked post to Play.

A page with 29 followers posting install-button content is basically an ad post for paid distribution. The whole story of this app is in that one line of voiceover: it isn't selling a tool, it's selling suspicion about one specific person.

What it is

You link your own WhatsApp, pick a few contacts, and it records when they come online and go offline, sends "they're online" alerts, draws daily and weekly online timelines, and can place two people's timelines side by side (showing who was online at the same time). It also throws in status image and video downloads.

The store page is written carefully. The first line is "Choose a good time to connect," and throughout it only says it "shows the status visible to the accounts you link" and "what the other person has hidden, this app can't show." The last paragraph is a disclaimer: for lawful use only, respect others' privacy, unaffiliated with any chat platform. These lines are written for Google's reviewers; what buyers want is already spelled out in the ad above.

Free to download, with ads, and in-app purchases of $4.99–$29.99 (Google Play store page, 11-06).

How it got 90,000 installs

Source: before October, figures are third-party AppstoreSpy estimates; from 10-29 on, they are Google Play installs. The Nigeria store page for 11-06 shows the "50K+" tier.

The curve is stepwise: sharp jumps every few days, flat in between. Organic search doesn't look like this; ads released in batches do (inference). In the last 7 days it rose about 41%, and it's still accelerating.

On the charts it only shows up in the category Top Grossing, with almost no Top Free presence (just #128 in South Africa's Utilities Top Free). 11-06 positions: Nigeria Utilities Top Grossing #35, South Africa 41, India 42, Malaysia 80, Brazil 133, Indonesia 194. A week ago it was only charted in India (60) and South Africa (49). So not many people are installing it, but the share who pay is high.

Why these countries: WhatsApp is effectively the phone book there, Meta ads are cheap, and the bar for tools top-grossing is low, so 90,000 installs is enough to crack the top 50.

Who makes it: a reskinned assembly line

The developer is Hodor Tools App, website hodorhk.top, a studio based in Hong Kong. According to AppBrain, it has 19 apps on Google Play, active since 2023, with roughly 20M installs in total. Some visible ones: Face Me AI photo editor (13.9M installs), Phone Tracker: Family Locator (listed in December 2025, 1.02M installs), Photo Recovery (June 2026, 720k installs), and an IPTV short drama app (June 2026, 130k installs). There is also an account called HodorHK on the App Store.

This is a typical studio playbook: find a category that has already been validated, reskin it, list it, buy user acquisition, collect subscriptions, then move on to the next one. Once the "monitor family members" line of Phone Tracker worked, the same approach carried over to WhatsApp almost without any new learning.

How crowded this street is

Among the top 50 grossing tools apps in Nigeria, South Africa, India and Brazil, nearly half are WhatsApp tracking apps (Google Play charts, 11-06). This app is a small player among them:

Source: Google Play, 11-06.

There is also Wondershare's Tracover, When: Last Seen aimed at parents, and a long tail of newcomers with "Log" in their names: WesLog, FineLog, ZapiLog, LogNow, many of them made by Turkish companies, and in early September a DiaLog appeared. WeSeen, which launched around the same time, added more than three times as many users per week.

Feature-wise, it is nearly identical to SinLog, GateLog and WeLastseen, with no visible product difference. Its one distinction is the route of linking your own account and only showing the other person's public status, a framing that is more compliant and carries slightly less takedown risk. But that is not why it grew. It grew because of distribution: a provocative ad, a handful of cheap countries, and a name stuffed with keywords (the title "Last Seen, Online Tracker", package name wa.online.tracker.last.seen.monitor, which takes the category's main search terms).

Where the money comes in, and where it leaks out

It has no rating or reviews of its own yet, so real retention is not visible. But reviews of the incumbent WeLastseen in the India store from 9 to October spell out how this business collects money. Dozens of one-star reviews describe almost the same thing:

"It said a 3-day free trial, and the moment I subscribed it charged ₹1,099.99 straight away. I canceled right away and asked for a refund, Google refused and told me to contact the developer." (WeLastseen, India, 9-17)

"The money was taken but the app wouldn't work, it kept saying it couldn't link." (WeLastseen, India, 9-16)

"WhatsApp gives this for free, and they use it to take money, ₹1,099.99 gone instantly." (WeLastseen, India, 9-18, original in Hindi)

There are also five-star reviews saying "I can finally see what my spouse is doing." The profile of this business is clear: users arrive anxious, in a hurry, and don't read the payment page carefully. Trials convert to charges immediately, billing repeats weekly, cash comes in fast, and reputation sours just as fast, which is why the leading apps in this category sit between 3.2 and 3.8 stars. They survive by continually buying new users, not by keeping old ones.

Will it get shut down?

WhatsApp does the opposite of what these apps do: users can hide their "last seen" and "online" status in settings. WhatsApp has also said publicly that it bans accounts of such services and asks Google to remove these apps. The "couldn't link" complaints in the reviews are probably WhatsApp blocking them (inference).

But judging by the charts, this street is still doing well today, and the top players have run for three or four years. The risk is always there, it just hasn't landed yet. The approach is for one studio to run a dozen or more apps at once: when one gets pulled, swap the package name and the account and list again.

If it were you

One-line verdict: don't build in this category. What you can learn is the playbook, not this app.

Who it suits: studios that already have a matrix of Google Play developer accounts, can run short-video ads on Meta, have a subscription playbook, and can absorb takedowns at any time. For them this is just another category: ship one, run it for two weeks, and stop if the numbers don't work.

Who it doesn't suit: solo indie developers and small teams. You would run into three problems: twenty or thirty similar apps fighting over the same search terms and ad slots, with leaders who started three or four years earlier and are two orders of magnitude bigger; WhatsApp and Google can clear the field whenever they like, and you have no backup accounts; and a large share of this business's profit comes from gray tactics like charging on trial start, which means that with a clean paywall the unit economics probably don't work (inference).

If you still want to follow it, how: don't copy the features, copy the structure. Find a need with high anxiety where people pay for a specific person (checking a partner, finding a phone, recovering deleted photos, seeing who viewed my profile). Target countries with heavy WhatsApp use and cheap ads (Nigeria, South Africa, India, Brazil, Indonesia). Run vertical videos with an emotional hook on Meta, monetize with both subscriptions and ads, stuff the title and package name with the main search terms, and write the store copy so it looks compliant. Same playbook, but in a category that hasn't yet been filled by twenty or thirty apps.

How to acquire users: borrow the voiceover from the ad: a specific person, a specific doubt, a twist of "I showed her this", under 23 seconds, with a button that goes straight to the store page. Test a dozen or so creatives in one country with a small budget, see which ones bring cost per paying user below the first-purchase price, and only then scale spend (inference).

When to get in: there is no deadline. This category is already past the "early" stage. What you should look for is the next category with the same structure that is still empty.

What would show the read is wrong: ① it breaks into the top 10 grossing tools charts in Nigeria or India before January with a rating holding above 4 stars, which would mean newcomers can still capture a large share and the category is less crowded than it looks; ② conversely, if WhatsApp or Google removes leading apps like WeLastseen or SinLog in batches before year end, the street is really closing, and even "learn the playbook" would have to be applied to a different category.