‘Are You Dead?’ app goes viral in China (VIDEO)

Paid download ‘Si Le Ma’ alerts an emergency contact if users go silent

An app that requires people living alone to regularly confirm they are alive has reportedly become the top paid download on Apple’s App Store in China, underscoring rising social concerns driven by the country’s rapid demographic shift.

The app, known as ‘Si Le Ma’ in Chinese (translated as “Are You Dead?” in English), functions as a digital check-in system. The app costs 8 yuan, or about $1.15, to download. Launched in mid-2025, it saw downloads surge only in early January, according to Chinese media reports. Users must press a button to signal they are safe, and if they fail to do so for two consecutive days, the app automatically sends an alert to a pre-selected emergency contact.

Its rise in popularity coincides with two overlapping trends: a growing number of young Chinese choosing to live alone rather than marry and have children, and an expanding elderly population increasingly left isolated without nearby family support.

One of the app’s three young co-creators, who identified himself only as Lyu, told local media it was aimed at young people living alone in major cities, particularly women around the age of 25.

Such users were likely to “experience a strong sense of loneliness due to the lack of people to communicate with… accompanied by… worries about unforeseen events occurring without anyone knowing,” he said.

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China recorded its third consecutive year of population decline in 2024 and in 2023 lost its status as the world’s most populous country to India.

As fertility drops, life expectancy lengthens, marriages decline, and divorce rates continue to rise, these factors are creating a trend of ‘one-person households’, said Wei-Jun Jean Yeung, a social demography expert at the National University of Singapore, as quoted by the Financial Times, adding that the concern was real.

China could have as many as 200 million one-person households by 2030, with more than 30% of the population living alone, according to projections published in 2021 by property research firm Beike Research Institute.

A separate government survey conducted in 2021 found that nearly 60% of Chinese aged 60 and above lived alone or only with a spouse, up about 10 percentage points from 2010.