TV Time app shut down prompts founder to build new home for fans

TV Time, a popular TV and movie-tracking app, is shutting down, prompting its founder to create a new home for its fans. Antonio Pinto, one of the app's original founders, is building Bingers, a new TV show tracking app that aims to rebuild the best features of TV Time while addressing its issues. Bingers will offer TV Time's existing users a potential lifeline soon after the original app disappears from the app stores.

The new app will also give the existing social community another place to discuss TV episodes. According to data from app intelligence provider Appfigures, TV Time has more than 26.4 million lifetime installs, many of those users potentially helping seed the new app's community. Pinto sold his app, then called TVShow Time, to Whipclip (now Whip Media) in 2016, after the company promised it could grow the app's user base significantly.

When he heard the app was being wound down as Whip Media shifted its focus to AI, Pinto felt sad. "Sad because TV Time was part of my life for so many years. And sad because this community was like my other family.

Reading the community reactions after each episode became a ritual for me, and for many others," Pinto wrote in a blog post on the new Bingers website. "I decided to build the new home where the TV Time community could go. I wanted to rebuild all TV Time's great features, but also fix everything that always bothered me," he said.

The new Bingers app will address TV Time's performance issues, which often caused the app to load slowly and made it expensive to run. Pinto claims high server costs led to the shutdown, noting that its premium subscription plan only covered about 10% of those expenses. Instead, Bingers has been architected to keep its server costs low, making it more sustainable, Pinto claims.

It will also allow the app to respond faster when users mark an episode as watched, even when millions of others are connecting at the same time. The developer tells TechCrunch that the new app will be available on the App Store and Google Play by the end of July 2026. Until then, the website is collecting sign-ups for a waitlist that will alert users when the new app is ready for launch.

The archive import is already up and running on the Bingers website, so users' TV viewing history will already be available when the app launches on the app stores. Of course, Bingers will also be able to import data from users' TV Time archives, available through the app's GDPR-compliant export tool before its removal from the app stores on July 15. By importing users' archives, Pinto says Bingers will be able to recreate TV Time's community comments as well.

Why this matters: The shutdown of TV Time and the creation of Bingers highlights the challenges of sustaining social media-like apps that rely on user engagement and community interaction. For developers, this means prioritizing sustainable business models and community building. For users, it's a reminder of the impermanence of their favorite apps and the importance of data portability.