Miitomo was one of those weird experiments that Nintendo tried to pull off as they tried to tackle the mobile market.
Miitomo was a free social network app for iOS and Android devices that allowed users to connect with their friends in interesting ways by answering questions and other things of the sort.
Initially released in March of 2016,
Miitomo was received fairly well but the application was not able to get enough traction. Much like the
Miiverse, it stems from an era of commercial failure with the Wii U, and trying to do something that could garner the attention from users worldwide. And so it did, within the first month since launch
Miitomo was reported to have a userbase of over 10 million people with more than 300 million conversations among friends and 20 million screenshots taken within the app. At one point it was even overtaking Snapchat on the U.S. App Store.
The success of the app didn't last long since later observations found out that only a quarter of those millions of users were using
Miitomo on a regular basis, as of May 2016. Along with
Miiverse(shut down last November),
Miitomo was scheduled to be shut down on the 9th of May and today the app is nowhere to be found on the App Store.
While this does disagree a bit with
some sayings by the soon-to-be president of Nintendo, Shuntaro Furukawa, Miitomo being discontinued is probably for the best. Mr. Furukawa was hinting at the possibility of expanding the mobile market, but it is likely that he wants to focus on applications like
Super Mario Run or
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, both for iOS and Android devices, which are considered to be legitimate games and not social network applications like
Miitomo.