This time last year, the hottest Chinese tech product was DeepSeek’s market-moving artificial intelligence model. In 2026, it’s something far simpler: an app for people worried about dying alone.

The bluntly named “Are You Dead?” platform rocketed to the top of the app-store charts in China before going viral globally. The interface is almost aggressively plain. Users, largely people living alone, tap to confirm they are still alive. Miss two days in a row and an emergency contact gets notified.

Besides its provocative moniker, there’s a reason the app went mega-viral without spending a dime on advertising — and didn’t even have to pretend to be a buzzy new AI product. Its surge coincided with the nation’s birth rate plunging to its lowest on record, at a time when marriage figures are falling and divorces are ticking up.

While many assumed it was developed for elderly users seeking to hold on to their independence, it was actually created by a team of Gen-Z developers who said in interviews they were inspired by their own experiences of isolating urban life. One-person households are expected to swell to as many as 200 million in the country by 2030.

These demographic changes aren’t unique to modern China, but they’re definitely not the kind of publicity Beijing wants right now. The platform was quietly removed from Chinese app stores this month. In a culture where frank mentions of dying are seen as taboo and inauspicious, the creators also said on micro-blogging site Weibo that they were planning on rebranding. The new international name, “Demumu,” is a Labubu-fied riff on the word “death.” It didn’t catch on as expected, and the developers are now crowdsourcing a new idea via social media.

Despite striking a nerve in Beijing and around the world, the product’s concept is annoyingly good. I’m jealous I didn’t think of it. As Big Tech and startups race to come up with the next hit AI application, the most common complaint I hear from actual humans is that many of these tools are solutions hunting for a problem. I don’t need a model to summarize a two-line message from a friend, and having software interpose itself in basic intimacy can feel more intrusive than helpful.

“Are You Dead?” does the opposite. It’s not trying to be clever, but purely practical. It offers a small sense of security to people living solo — even as its existence makes plain a rising loneliness epidemic. The name, a dark twist on the popular “Are You Hungry?” food delivery platform, channels the nihilistic Gen-Z humor of the lay-flat generation. Online, many Chinese youth didn’t treat it as offensive, but rather as a kind of memento mori.

Efforts to force AI into more facets of our life have rightly commanded the spotlight. But across Asia and beyond, eldercare tech is poised to boom. Beijing has been touting the silver economy as a future engine of growth, pointing to seniors’ rising spending power and willingness to adopt new digital platforms. Rather than discourage these innovations and the uncomfortable questions they raise, the government should welcome these tools.

In the U.S., the American Association of Retired Persons forecasts that older Americans’ spending on technology will rise to $120 billion by 2030, despite 59% of adults over 50 feeling it isn’t designed with their age in mind. There’s a ballooning opportunity globally for developers to tap into this market and ameliorate that disconnect.

But the deeper debate unleashed by the app’s virality is something that will be even harder for the industry to address: Is technology making us more or less lonely? Globally, social media has made it much more convenient to avoid meeting in-person. In China, super-apps have optimized everything — you don’t have to say a word to a real person to hail a ride or order delivery meals and essentials. And in the pursuit of AI supremacy, people are working longer hours, driven by a grueling (and technically illegal) 996 culture that encourages more time away from home.

DeepSeek was China’s splashy tech moment; “Are You Dead?” is the hangover. The no-frills check-in app didn’t top the charts because of brilliant engineering. It went viral because it translated demographic and social anxiety into a push notification. Beijing can scrub it from the stores and its creators can try to Labubu-fy “death.” The underlying demand it exposed for connection won’t disappear.

It's also a warning shot for the AI industry: The next hit product likely won’t be built on summarizing our conversations. It will be one that confronts why we’re having fewer of them. In the race to make machines more human, China’s first breakout app of the year just asks if you still have a pulse.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Catherine Thorbecke is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Asia tech. Previously she was a tech reporter at CNN and ABC News.

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