2026-07-19 · signal
We classified the cause of death for 81 AI-era apps. The killers are not what the discourse says they are.
As of July 19, 2026 we track 1,546 AI-built apps and pulse-check every one of them weekly. 81 are dead. We read the shutdown notices, the DNS records, and the postmortems, and tagged each death with a cause. The 90-day trope does not survive contact with our data: 93.3% of apps tracked for at least 90 days still respond (n=1,214), and the median dead app in our graveyard lived 27 months. Of the 81 deaths, 44 have a cause we could classify: 18 acquired or absorbed, 9 killed by their own parent or platform vendor, 7 lapsed domains or hosting, 6 ran out of money, 3 outcompeted, 1 founder walked away. 30 of the 44 were another company's decision, not the market and not the code.