TV Time, the TV show tracking app with more than 26.4 million lifetime installs, will be removed from app stores on July 15, 2026 TechCrunch. Antonio Pinto, one of the app's original founders, is now building a replacement called Bingers, which he plans to ship on the App Store and Google Play by the end of July.

Pinto co-founded the app under the name TVShow Time and sold it to Whipclip — later rebranded Whip Media — in 2016 TechCrunch. He is based in Paris. TechCrunch first reported the app's pending shutdown on July 2, 2026, and followed up this week with Pinto's response and the details of his new venture.

According to Pinto, the shutdown traces back to economics rather than declining usage. He states that TV Time's premium subscription tier covered only about 10% of the app's server expenses, leaving a persistent gap that Whip Media was no longer willing to fund. The company has shifted its strategic focus to AI products, and TV Time — a social tracking app for logging watched episodes, rating shows, and following friends' viewing habits — was wound down as part of that pivot TechCrunch.

The reaction from the user base has been pointed. A Change.org petition opposing the shutdown has drawn more than 25,000 signatures, a notable figure for what is, on paper, a niche companion-app category rather than a primary streaming product. Pinto announced his plans for Bingers in a blog post published at bingers.app/history ahead of his conversation with TechCrunch, framing the new app explicitly as a continuation point for displaced TV Time users.

Bingers' most consequential technical feature, from a user-retention standpoint, is data portability. The app will support importing users' TV Time viewing histories via TV Time's GDPR-compliant export tool, letting users carry over years of logged episodes, ratings, and watch statuses rather than starting from zero. For an app category whose entire value proposition is a longitudinal record of what someone has watched, cold-start data loss is close to existential — a user with a decade of tracked history has far more reason to stay than to migrate to a blank slate elsewhere.

The mechanics here are worth dwelling on briefly. GDPR's data portability provision (Article 20) obliges controllers to provide personal data in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format on request. Whip Media apparently built or maintained an export path sufficient to satisfy that obligation, and Pinto's new venture is now the direct beneficiary of that compliance infrastructure — a case where a regulatory requirement designed to protect individual users' rights ends up functioning as a de facto migration bridge between a shutting-down incumbent and its successor.

The economics Pinto describes are not unusual for the category. Tracking and companion apps — for TV, for fitness, for reading — tend to accumulate large, engaged, low-monetizing user bases. Server and infrastructure costs scale with usage regardless of whether users convert to paid tiers, and a 10% cost-coverage ratio from subscriptions is a difficult number to sustain indefinitely, particularly once a parent company's capital and engineering attention move toward a higher-margin, higher-priority line of business such as AI tooling.

Bingers faces the same underlying unit-economics problem TV Time did, and Pinto has not detailed, per the available reporting, how the new app's cost structure or monetization plan will differ meaningfully from its predecessor's. What is different is timing and audience: Bingers arrives with a ready-made, vocal, and demonstrably loyal user base actively looking for a destination, which is a considerably easier customer-acquisition position than most consumer app launches enjoy.

Worth flagging: the reliance on TV Time's export tool as the migration path assumes that tool remains functional and accessible through the July 15 shutdown and beyond. Any gap between the app's removal from stores and users successfully exporting their data would undercut the continuity Pinto is promising. TechCrunch's reporting does not specify a guaranteed export window or deadline distinct from the app-store removal date.

In this author's view, the episode is a reasonably clean illustration of a pattern familiar from earlier platform shutdowns across social and utility apps: a founder-built community product gets acquired, scales past what its monetization model supports, gets deprioritized once the acquirer's strategic focus shifts, and the original founder — or someone else entirely — attempts to recapture the displaced userbase under new infrastructure. Whether Bingers succeeds will depend less on feature parity than on whether Pinto has solved the server-cost problem that sank the original app, a detail not yet public.

Bingers' launch, expected before the end of July, will be the first real test of whether that userbase — and the 25,000-plus petition signatories in particular — follows.