Why Ablo Pointed Users to Azar in 2022

On 30 September 2022, Ablo shut down. The only message users saw was "Ablo has been discontinued… please use Azar." For millions of people who had built friendships across borders, that redirect felt less like a handoff and more like a door slamming shut.

The move made business sense on paper. Both apps lived under the same corporate roof. But for users, the transition was a dead end: no accounts, no friends, no chats ever moved over. Here is how it happened and why people are still talking about it.

The corporate connection

Ablo came from Massive Media, the Belgian team behind Netlog and Twoo. Massive Media was already part of Match Group before Ablo launched. Match Group bought Hyperconnect, the company behind Azar, in 2021.

So when Ablo shut down, the redirect to Azar was a consolidation within the same parent company. Ablo never gave a public reason for the shutdown. Users guessed it was about moderation costs, safety problems, or simply folding a smaller product into a bigger one. No official explanation ever came.

What moved across: nothing

The redirect was a single line of text and a link. Nothing else transferred.

• No accounts. Your username, profile, miles and coins stayed on Ablo's dead servers.
• No friends. Your entire friend list vanished. People who had chatted for three years lost contact because Ablo was the only channel they shared.
• No chat history. Every conversation, every translation, every shared moment was gone. There was no export option.
• No warning. Most users learned about the shutdown only when login failed. There was no email, no in-app countdown, no chance to say goodbye.

One reviewer wrote in Spanish: "La extraño." (I miss it.) That review became the most-upvoted line in the post-shutdown period, with over 1,140 people agreeing.

How users reacted

The response was almost universally negative. Users did not want Azar. They wanted Ablo.

Rejected on arrival

Azar was a video-first app. Ablo had started as text-first with optional video. Users who had loved the text-based, translated conversations found Azar jarring.

• "Ablo geri gelsin, Azar'ı istemiyoruz" (Bring Ablo back, we don't want Azar) – Turkish reviewers
• "biz aileydik" (we were a family) – another Turkish user, describing the Ablo community
• "not the same" – repeated in English, Portuguese and Spanish reviews

Many reviewers called Azar "more sexual" and "not the same."

Grief reviews that lasted years

The Ablo listing stayed live on Google Play for years after the shutdown, running on a dying backend. New users who found it saw "something went wrong." The 1-star share climbed to about 38% in 2023-2026.

Pleas to bring Ablo back continued into August 2026. One user offered $1,000 to buy Ablo and keep it running. Another wrote: "4 yıldır herhangi bir güncelleme yapılmamış… silin kardeşim" (no update in 4 years… just delete it, brother).

The 2025 copy proved the demand

In January 2025, a copy app appeared under the same name, published by Yancheng Binary Tree Technology. It pulled 100,000 installs on name recognition alone. But it earned only a 2.2-star rating. Users complained about paywalls after 2-3 messages, translation being paid, crashes, and bans with no reason given – the original's worst flaw all over again.

Many reviews on the copy asked to "bring back the 2022 / pandemic version." People were not looking for a clone. They were looking for the original experience.

What users lost

The shutdown erased more than an app. It erased networks.

What was lost	Why it mattered
Friend lists	Three years of cross-border friendships, no backup
Chat histories	Every translated conversation, gone
Miles and coins	Earned currency with no value after shutdown
Community	The shared identity of "Ablo travellers"

One user offered to pay $1,000 to buy Ablo and keep it running. Another wrote that Ablo "helped me out of depression." The app had won Google Play's Best App of 2019 and was cited at 6.5 million downloads across 180 countries, with about 50,000 friendships formed per day.

What the redirect tells us

The Ablo-to-Azar redirect was a corporate decision, not a product migration. Users were told to switch, but nothing was built to help them. No shared login. No friend import. No chat export.

The result was predictable: users rejected Azar and kept searching for what they had lost. The demand outlived the product by years.

An alternative that keeps the spirit

If you miss the Ablo experience – flying to a random country, chatting with someone across the world, having every message translated – there is an app built around the same idea without the paywalls and video-first design.

Olu works in a browser, nothing to install. You tap to take off and fly to a random country. Chat is one-to-one text only – no video, no voice calls. Every message is translated both ways, with the original a tap away. Miles are earned and never bought, and nothing you need to talk to someone costs money. Friends and reconnecting are free. If nobody from a country is online, you may meet an AI local, always labelled as AI.

No accounts to lose. No corporate redirect. Just the feeling of travelling from your sofa, one conversation at a time.

try Olu