Did Your AI Chat App Vanish From the App Store? Move to RolePlaya in Ten Minutes

The short answer: your characters and stories do not have to go down with the app. If Chai, PolyBuzz, Tipsy Chat or Botify AI disappeared from your App Store this autumn, you can be roleplaying on RolePlaya in about ten minutes, with your favourite characters and even your old chats brought across. Here is exactly how.

Why I know how this feels

I was the number one creator on PolyBuzz, with close to a thousand characters. I watched them get hit with violations one after another, with no explanation and no way to appeal, until I gave up and built RolePlaya instead. This October, PolyBuzz’s iPhone app vanished from the App Store altogether, a week before Chai’s did. If you are reading this because your app has just gone, I get it. Losing the characters you have spent months with is not a small thing.

So I built RolePlaya so this cannot happen to it. It is a web app, not an App Store app. There is no listing for anyone to pull, and a store rule change cannot take it off your phone. Why RolePlaya lives on the web.

Step 1: put RolePlaya on your home screen

• iPhone: open roleplaya.com in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. It opens full screen with its own icon, like any other app.
• Android: download the RolePlaya app from roleplaya.com, or open the site in Chrome and choose Add to Home screen.
• PC: just use the site, or install it from your browser’s address bar.

Step 2: make a free account

Sign up with no card details. The free plan gives you 50 messages a day, and there are no adverts on any plan. RolePlaya is 18+ only: you confirm your age when you sign up, and there is no face scan or ID upload.

Step 3: bring your characters across

1. On the old app or its website, open each character you care about and copy its name, greeting, personality and backstory into a note. Do this first, while you still can.
2. On RolePlaya, open Create a Character and paste them into the matching fields.
3. If the character came from Janitor AI, Chub or SillyTavern, skip the copying and import the JSON file or PNG character card directly.

Step 4: carry on your old chats

This is the part people do not expect. You can bring a conversation over and pick the story up where you left it. Import Chat is free on every plan.

1. Copy the conversation from the old app or its website. Chai, PolyBuzz and Talkie have no export button, so copying the text is the way.
2. On RolePlaya, open a chat with the matching character, open the menu and tap Import Chat.
3. Choose Copied text and paste it in. Each message should start with the speaker’s name and a colon, like Amber: Hello there.
4. Check where the story got to and tap Continue. Your next message carries on the same story.

The full walkthrough, site by site, is in how to bring your characters and chats to RolePlaya.

Step 5: make your Playa

Your Playa is you, in every story: a name, a look and a little about who you are, so characters know who they are talking to. It takes a minute, and you can keep several and switch between them.

Step 6: find new characters

There are thousands of public characters on RolePlaya, made by creators who care about them. The homepage learns what you like as you chat, and you can filter by gender, tags and style. Group chats, voices, images and long-term memory are all there when you want them.

What is honestly different

• No App Store listing. You install it from your browser, not a store. That is the whole point.
• The free plan has a daily cap of 50 messages. Bit of a Playa is $9.99 a month and Total Playa is $19.99 a month, or you can buy a short pass instead of subscribing.
• Your followers and likes do not come with you. Characters and chats do. The rest belongs to the old site.
• A real person answers. I am in the Discord every day, and most fixes land the same day.

I keep a running list of every AI chat app pulled from the App Store this year, with what still works for each one: AI chat apps pulled from the App Store in 2026.

Start free on RolePlaya