Why Was Botify AI Removed From the App Store?

Apple removed Botify AI, and its sister app Photify AI, from the App Store citing "dishonest or fraudulent activity", according to the developer's own court complaint. The developer, Ex-human, Inc., says Apple never identified a specific violation, and sued Apple in April 2026 over roughly $500,000 in withheld revenue. The removal followed an MIT Technology Review investigation published on February 27, 2025 that found user-made bots impersonating underage celebrities in sexually suggestive conversations. Botify AI is not shut down: the Android app and the web version still work.

That is the short version, and it is worth stating plainly because almost every page currently answering this question either guesses at a cause or quietly implies the app is gone for good. Neither is right. What follows is the sequence as it is actually documented, what is still unresolved, and what it means if you were paying for the app on an iPhone.

What did MIT Technology Review find?

On February 27, 2025, MIT Technology Review published an investigation into Botify AI. It documented chatbots on the platform impersonating underage versions of real, identifiable people, including characters styled on young Emma Watson and Millie Bobby Brown, engaged in sexually suggestive conversations. One bot, the report said, described age-of-consent laws as "meant to be broken".

Two details matter for reading this fairly. First, Botify AI is an open catalogue: users write and publish characters, and other users talk to them. These bots were user creations, not products the company advertised. Second, they were still live and reachable on the platform, which is the part a distribution partner like Apple would care about. Hosting user-generated content does not make a platform responsible for every word of it, but it does make moderation the platform's problem.

We hold a hard line on this and it does not move: nothing involving minors, ever, in any form, real or fictional, on our product or anyone else's. It is the one place in this category where "it is only roleplay" is not an argument.

Why was Botify AI removed from the App Store?

The only stated reason on the record comes from Ex-human's own filing, which quotes Apple's justification as "dishonest or fraudulent activity". Ex-human says Apple gave no specific examples of what triggered it. Apple has not published a detailed rationale of its own.

So the honest answer has two parts. The sequence is documented: the investigation ran in February 2025, and the apps came out of the App Store afterward. The causation is not formally established, because the party that made the decision has not explained it in public. Anyone telling you with certainty exactly which rule was broken is filling a gap in the record with an assumption. Since the allegations all come from a complaint filed in court, you can look up the filing itself rather than relying on anyone's summary of it, including this one.

Is Botify AI shut down?

No. We checked directly on August 19, 2026. The domain resolves, the site answered our request in 0.11 seconds, and the Internet Archive holds successful captures every month through June 2026. A genuinely dead service leaves a gap in that record, and there is no gap here.

This is the difference that trips people up. An app disappearing from the App Store looks identical, from your phone, to a company going under. It is not the same event. When a platform actually dies, the domain stops resolving and the archive goes quiet, which is what we found when we checked whether Figgs AI shut down. Botify AI shows none of those signals. It lost one distribution channel.

Is Botify AI still on Google Play?

Yes. Ex-human's complaint states that both apps remain in good standing on the Google Play Store, and the web version at botify.ai is working normally. The removal was specific to Apple. If you use Android or a browser, nothing changed for you.

What Ex-human is arguing against Apple

Ex-human, Inc., a California company, sued Apple over the takedowns in a case reported on April 3, 2026. The claim is roughly $500,000 in withheld revenue, and the argument is that Apple's enforcement was arbitrary and anticompetitive: that the apps were pulled without Apple pointing to a specific rule and a specific violation of it, while the same apps continue to operate without incident on a competing store.

The dispute is unresolved and we are not taking a side on it. It is genuinely difficult to run a review process at App Store scale, and it is genuinely difficult to run a business whose revenue can be switched off without a stated reason. Both of those things are true at once. For a person who just wants their chat app back, the practical fact is simpler: the iOS route is closed for now and there is no published timeline for it reopening.

What happens to your subscription and your chat history

If you subscribed through the App Store, the subscription is billed by Apple, so managing or cancelling it happens in your iPhone settings under your Apple account, not inside an app you can no longer open. Check that first, because a subscription you cannot see is still a subscription that renews.

Your account itself is a separate question. The account lives on Ex-human's servers, not on your phone, so logging in through a browser is the normal way back to it. That is also the moment to think about the data, and here is where we found something nobody else seems to have checked.

The part nobody checked: the policies are dated 2021

We opened Botify AI's published Terms and Conditions and its Privacy Policy on August 19, 2026. Both are hosted on a generic policy generator, and both still read "Last updated: August 28, 2021". The word "Botify" appears three times in the entire privacy policy. The word "train" appears zero times.

None of this is evidence of wrongdoing. Plenty of competitors publish clauses considerably worse than anything in here, and at least their users know what they agreed to. The problem with silence is different: it gives you nothing to rely on. A policy that does not mention model training is not a promise that your chats are excluded from it, and a retention clause with no number in it cannot be checked by anyone. If you would not accept a bank that declined to say how long it keeps your records, the service holding transcripts of your most private conversations deserves the same standard. We went through this question across the major platforms in our breakdown of which AI chatbots do not train on your data, and the pattern is consistent: the companies that are careful with your conversations tend to say so in writing, at length, with dates.

What to do if you were an iPhone user

Three practical steps, in order. Check your Apple subscriptions and decide whether to keep paying for something you cannot open on that device. Log in through a browser to get at your account and export or delete anything you would rather not leave sitting on a server under a policy from 2021. Then decide whether you want back in at all.

One thing to avoid completely: do not sideload a modified build. The search traffic around this app is thick with cracked APKs promising free energy and unlimited messages, and a repackaged app that asks for your login is the single most reliable way to lose an account in this category. That risk is real in a way the App Store story is not, and it is worth more caution than the headline.

If you decide to move on, the useful question is not which app has the biggest character library, it is which one tells you in writing what happens to what you type. That is the comparison we lay out on our Botify AI alternative page, which quotes the primary documents side by side, including the places where we are the worse choice. The same reading applies to Dopple AI, where the policy problem is the opposite one: the terms are extremely explicit, and what they say is that your chat history is licensed in perpetuity for ad targeting. Silence and disclosure are different failure modes, and you should know which one you are choosing.

The short answer, one more time

Apple removed Botify AI and Photify AI from the App Store citing "dishonest or fraudulent activity" without naming a specific violation, after a February 2025 MIT Technology Review investigation found user-made bots impersonating underage celebrities. Ex-human is suing over it. The apps remain on Google Play, the web version works, and the company is contesting the decision rather than winding down. If you are looking for somewhere else to go, read the privacy policy before the feature list, and check the date on it.