thearchivist.funMeerkat disappears from the App Store
Engadget reported on 1 October 2016 that Meerkat's chief executive Ben Rubin had tweeted on 30 September that his team had removed the app from the App Store. The Google Play listing also stopped working, and the official website and Twitter account went dead. Meerkat had 'taken SXSW by storm' in 2015, the report said, and Periscope, backed by Twitter, had since reigned supreme. The team's new product was Houseparty, a video chat app for more than two users, which the creators had released under a pseudonym and admitted building only days before; it had nearly a million sign-ups by then. Rubin told TechCrunch that one-to-many broadcasting 'wasn't breaking as a daily habit', and that Houseparty better fit the aim of connecting people who were physically apart.
Context and provenance
Meerkat is a useful counterpoint to the Periscope record in this collection: two live-streaming apps launched in the same period, and one is documented by a company notice and a community project, the other by a tweet and a report.
The report gives no launch date, so the timeline here starts from the event it describes. Treat the founder's reasons as his own account, and look for outside evidence before treating them as the cause.
Date Meerkat's end to the 30 September 2016 tweet as reported, and cite the Engadget article for it. If you can find the tweet itself or an App Store capture, cite that as stronger evidence. Treat the explanation about daily habits as the founder's account, offered to a news outlet.
Transmission timeline
- 2015
Meerkat 'took SXSW by storm', in the article's words.
- 2016-09-30
Rubin tweets that the app has been removed from the App Store.
Why it matters
A live-streaming app that stirred a conference in 2015 left through a quiet removal from the app store.
What remains uncertain
The month of the 2015 event is not given in the source. The founder's reasons are his own account.
Sources and evidence
- Engadget: Meerkat the livestreaming app is no more
30 September 2016 removal from the App Store, the dead website and Twitter account, Houseparty, Rubin's stated reasons.
Editorial review: 2026-10-22. New evidence may change this account.