Ablo App: The Complete Story of the Chat App That Let You Fly Anywhere (2019–2022)

For a little under four years, one app let millions of people do something that sounds simple and turned out to be rare: open your phone, tap a button, and a few seconds later be talking to a stranger in Kenya, Brazil or Japan, each of you writing in your own language.

That app was Ablo. It won Google Play's Best App of 2019, was cited at 6.5 million downloads across more than 180 countries, and was credited with around 50,000 new friendships a day. On 30 September 2022 it closed. People were still leaving reviews begging for it to come back in August 2026.

This guide is the full story: what Ablo was, how it worked, what changed, why people left, why it ended, and what you can use now. It draws on our own reading of 84,580 Google Play reviews of the original app, the Product Hunt launch, and public background sources. (Our review analysis explains the method.)

Olu is an independent app and is not affiliated with Ablo, Massive Media, Match Group, Azar or Hyperconnect. We use their names only to describe the history.

What was Ablo?

Ablo was a random one-to-one chat app with built-in translation, designed around the feeling of travel. The pitch was "travel the world from your sofa":

• You tapped to take off.
• A plane flew across a globe while a card showed trivia about your destination ("Hold your seat, we are flying to Kenya").
• You landed on one person who lived there.
• Every message was machine-translated in both directions, so neither of you needed a shared language.
• If you both wanted, you could move to a video call with live subtitles.
• You earned miles as you went, and kept the people you liked as friends.

Even its error messages stayed in character: "Someone forgot to fuel the plane", "Flight delayed". That consistency is a large part of why people remember it so fondly. In review after review, the plane, the globe and the miles are mentioned by name, as the thing that made Ablo Ablo.

Who made Ablo?

Ablo came from Massive Media, a team in Ghent, Belgium, best known for the social networks Netlog and Twoo. Massive Media was part of Match Group, the company behind Tinder and Hinge. (More in who made Ablo.)

It launched in early 2019 and reached #6 product of the day on Product Hunt on 22 January 2019, with 139 upvotes. At the end of that year Google named it one of the Best Apps of 2019 on Google Play, and review volume on the store tripled the following month.

How Ablo worked

The core loop was deliberately tiny: fly, land, talk, keep a friend or fly again.

Around that loop Ablo layered a small economy:

Currency	How you got it	What it did
Miles	Earned by using the app	Status, and unlocks such as hosting Live
Coins	Bought, and in some periods earned	Pick a continent or gender, reconnect with friends, extra flights, gifts
Diamonds (2022)	Received as gifts	Gift currency for Live streamers
Gold / Plus	Subscription	See who liked you, filters, read receipts

A few things it notably never offered, despite years of requests: choosing a specific country, deleting or unsending a message, online status, voice messages, finding a friend by username, and a lasting web version. See how Ablo worked and Ablo miles and coins for the details.

Why people loved it

When we grouped the praise in tens of thousands of reviews, the same things came up in every year and every language:

1. Translation that broke the language barrier. This was the product. People who shared no language at all had real conversations.
2. Meeting the world for free. One reviewer called it "a travel agency which doesn't charge anything".
3. Language practice with real people. Learners used it to practise English, Spanish, Turkish and more.
4. The flight concept itself. "I travelled without leaving home" was a recurring line.
5. Company during lockdown. Review volume climbed through 2020 and peaked in mid-2021.
6. No ads, for most of its life.

What changed, and why people left

Ablo did not fail because people stopped wanting it. Reading the reviews in date order, you can watch the app slowly charge for, and then remove, the things people loved. A short version (the full dated list is in our Ablo timeline):

• August 2019: coins arrive to choose a gender or continent.
• Spring 2020: as lockdowns start, coin prices roughly triple.
• Late May 2020: a hard cap of 10 free flights a day, and reconnecting with an existing friend needs a paid gift. People begin swapping WhatsApp and Instagram handles instead. (More on the limit.)
• Late 2021: coins charged even when a match leaves instantly; paid read receipts.
• November 2021: new matches open straight into video, and the in-house translator is replaced by forced Google Translate. (The video-first change.)
• February to May 2022: live voice translation is removed from video calls. This was the single biggest wave of complaints in the whole dataset.

Alongside those changes, the most common reason for a one-star review was not price or bugs. It was moderation: instant bans after a single report, no reason given, email-only appeals that went unanswered, and a user's entire friend list lost with the account. We cover that in Ablo bans explained.

Two other complaints never went away: the 12+ store rating for an app that required users to be 18 (Ablo's age rating), and the sense of landing in the same few countries again and again (why it felt like the same countries).

Why did Ablo shut down?

Ablo never published a reason. In September 2022 the app began pushing users towards Azar, a video-chat app from Hyperconnect, which Match Group had acquired in 2021. On 30 September 2022 the service closed with a single message telling people to use Azar.

The most likely explanation is consolidation: one company owning two apps with overlapping audiences keeps one. Users also guessed at moderation costs and safety problems. Any explanation is informed speculation, and we lay out the evidence in why did Ablo shut down.

What we do know from the reviews is how it felt. Most users found out only when login failed. There was no data export, so friendships that had lasted years, with Ablo as the only shared channel, simply vanished. (Lost your Ablo friends?)

Did users move to Azar?

Mostly, no. Reviews after the switch rejected Azar almost unanimously as "not the same": video-first, where Ablo had been text-first, and without the travel feeling. We compare the two in Ablo vs Azar.

Is Ablo coming back?

There is no sign the original will return. The Ablo name did reappear on Google Play in January 2025, but that app is published by an unrelated company, has a 2.2-star rating, and its users complain about paywalls after a few messages. It is not the original. See is Ablo coming back? and the new Ablo app in 2025.

The demand, though, never went away. People were still searching for Ablo and writing "bring it back" reviews four years after it closed.

What to use instead

If what you miss is the idea (a random person in another country, text first, translation both ways, a feeling of travel), look for these things:

• Text first, video optional. Forced video is where Ablo's harassment problems came from.
• Translation both ways, with the original visible, so you can learn from it.
• Free to meet people. Charging to pick who you meet, or to reconnect with a friend, is what drove people away.
• Clear moderation, with reasons and a real appeal.
• Works in a browser, so you can try it without installing anything.

That list is exactly why we built Olu. You tap to take off, fly to a random country, and chat one-to-one with translation both ways. Miles are earned, never bought, and nothing you need to talk to someone costs money. When nobody from a country is online, you might meet an AI local instead, and it is always clearly labelled as AI. Our longer comparison is apps like Ablo.

Ablo in numbers

Launched	Early 2019 (Product Hunt: 22 January 2019, #6 of the day)
Built by	Massive Media (Netlog, Twoo), part of Match Group
Award	Google Play Best App of 2019
Reach	6.5M downloads, 180+ countries, ~50,000 friendships a day (as reported)
Core audience	Ages 18–26
Google Play reviews	84,580 unique, average 3.64★
Busiest period	June–July 2021, over 4,000 reviews a month
Closed	30 September 2022, users redirected to Azar