TV Time shut down on July 15, 2026. Twenty-six million people lost their watchlists overnight. Popcorn is the app they should have been using all along: free forever, no ads, no tracking, and now with full series tracking.
What happened
On July 2, 2026, Whip Media announced that TV Time, one of the largest TV-tracking communities ever built, with more than 26 million lifetime installs, would be discontinued. The service ended after July 15. The app was pulled from the App Store and Google Play. The website went offline. And every personal account's data was permanently deleted, with no recovery path.
The reason given was blunt: running TV Time as a free app was no longer sustainable, and there wasn't enough demand for a paid one. The parent company had been acquired by a lender in early 2025 and was redirecting itself toward enterprise AI products.
Read that again. For fifteen years, millions of people handed over their viewing habits, their episode check-ins, their ratings and reactions, and when the app stopped being useful to the business, the business deleted them.
Community comments, episode reactions, polls, the GIFs people spent years posting: none of it was even exportable. It's just gone.
That's not a technical failure. That's what happens when the people using an app were never the customer.
What TV Time users actually want now
If you've spent the last two weeks reading migration threads, the same three things come up over and over:
- Get my history somewhere safe. Years of episodes. Non-negotiable.
- Give me a tracker I actually enjoy opening. Not a database with a login screen.
- Never let this happen again. No lock-in, no rug-pull, no "we're pivoting to AI."
The big incumbent, Trakt, does the first one well: its importer is the most reliable in the category. But it's honest to say that most people treat Trakt as plumbing rather than a home. Its own users describe the mobile experience as functional rather than delightful, and the last few years brought a VIP price increase, new limits on the free tier, and a redesign that a vocal chunk of its longtime community openly disliked. Simkl's servers have buckled under the migration surge. Serializd is lovely, but it's web-first.
So the utility is covered. The home is not.
That's the gap Popcorn was built for.
Meet Popcorn
Popcorn is a films-and-series companion for iPhone, Android, and Mac. It's made by a small independent studio in Switzerland, it already has more than 10,000 users, and it has a straightforward promise:
Free forever. No ads. No tracking. No "premium" tier holding your own watchlist hostage.
Not free-with-an-asterisk. Not freemium-until-we-need-a-new-revenue-line. Free, because the app is a craft project from a studio that makes its living elsewhere, not a data pipeline dressed up as a consumer app.
Series tracking: the thing you actually came for
Season by season, episode by episode. Check off what you've watched, see exactly where you left off, and know what's next. It's the feature that made TV Time indispensable, and it's now in Popcorn.
Swipe to discover
Don't know what to watch? Swipe. Popcorn's discovery mode turns "scrolling forever and giving up" into thirty seconds of yes/no. It's the single most-used feature in the app, and it's the reason people open it even when they're not tracking anything.
Know where to stream it
Every title tells you where it's actually available to watch, so you stop bouncing between five apps to find out that no, it isn't on Netflix anymore.
Recommend, follow, share
Follow the people whose taste you trust. Send a title straight to a friend. Popcorn's social layer is a genuine feature, not a growth-hacking funnel: it exists because recommending a great show to someone is one of life's small pleasures, not because engagement metrics needed a boost.
A real Mac app
Not a webpage in a window. A native macOS app with everything the mobile apps have. Track from the couch, plan from your desk.
The part nobody else will say out loud
Here's the uncomfortable question you should be asking every app courting TV Time refugees this month: what's your business model, and what happens to my data when it stops working?
TV Time's answer, in the end, was "we delete it."
Popcorn's answer is simpler because the incentives are different. There's no ad network to feed. There's no analytics SDK harvesting your viewing habits for a media-intelligence product. There's no VC clock ticking toward a monetization pivot. The app is small, it's independent, it's Swiss-made, and it's built by people who use it themselves.
That's not a growth strategy. It's just the reason it'll still be here.
Coming from TV Time?
Even though TV Time is gone, your export file isn't useless: if you grabbed it before the deadline, hold onto it. It's your watch history, and it's yours.
Popcorn makes it easy to rebuild: search is fast, adding a series takes a tap, and marking a season as watched is one gesture rather than twenty. Most people are back up and running in an evening.
And crucially: your data in Popcorn stays yours. Exportable, portable, not held hostage.
Get Popcorn
- iPhone & iPad: Download on the App Store
- Android: Get it on Google Play
- Mac: Download on the Mac App Store
Free. No ads. No tracking. Forever.
Twenty-six million people just learned what happens when an app treats you as inventory. Try one that doesn't.