Tech Companies that Will Flop By 2030.
By: Lisa Martens
Tags: Parody, Social Media, Startup, Humor, Tech

Tech Companies that Will Flop By 2030.

A parody. Hopefully.

Photo by Merakist on Unsplash

By 2020, with much of the Internet world already carved up, ideas for apps started to resemble fever dreams. Following this format:

The [name of existing app that has lots of users but may not be monetarily successful] of [item/activity].

…ideas for apps started to go wildly off the rails. The 2020s brought us the Uber of pillow upholstery, the Etsy of angsty poetry, and the Vine of doctor visits.

No longer were apps attempting to skyrocket. Exponential growth was not sustainable or even profitable. Finally, startups figured out that offering a service for free/cheap to the masses would only result in the general public using such an app as a social service (which is why Twitter became a government institution, like the DMV and garbage removal, in 2025).

Instead, to monetize apps straight out of the gate, startups began to focus on super-niche markets.

Here are the biggest failures of the 2020s.

VegX

Everyone with a green thumb knows that plants grow better when they are spoken to. VegX, an app only available on counterfeit iPhones, was designed for that person who always wants to grow plants, but couldn’t be bothered to learn how much water or sunlight a plant needed.

VegX was an app that did one thing: It spoke to plants. Specifically, it said kind words to plants. The basic, free service included lukewarm motivation, while paid features included a sexting option. Originally designed with a cruelty setting, this particular feature was killed after questions arose about the moral implications of verbally abusing plants.

VegX, released in 2021, was removed from the fake app store by 2023.

WriterPr0n

WriterPr0n was an app loaded with nostalgia. Resembling a Xanga/Wordpress hybrid, WriterPr0n lets writers waste time. The service came with plenty of different fonts and colors, likes, comment sections, full customization, the ability to add songs to your page, GIFs, and turning your cursor into a bow.

The goal of WriterPr0n was to make writers feel like they were working when they really weren’t.

The service worked too well. We now have no writers in this the Year of our Lord 2030. We’re not entirely sure where they all went, or what they have been working on the past 10 years, and we’re afraid to sign up for the service and find out.

MuTech

MuTech, or Museum Tech, was an app that let you photograph your old devices (Razor phones, box TVs) and add a funny caption about how kids these days don’t know how good they have it.

The app was shut down due to the high number of abuse complaints. Members repeatedly fought with one another about which piece of antiquated technology was more important.

Unable to see they were drowning in nostalgia, users fought to such a degree that law enforcement shut the app down and arrested 19 users for conspiracy to commit murder.

MuTech was formed in 2022 and shut down by 2023. The inventor of the app was described by its users as “too young to understand.”

FrankenFood

While some apps track fitness and the nutritional value of food, FrankenFood basically did the opposite. Invented at state fairs and mall food courts, the idea was to combine foods high in all the things doctors say will kill you.

Taste was not a factor in this app. The goal was to create the most insidious, destructive foods the body could tolerate.

The app dared users to combine ice cream with burgers, Cheetos with chocolate, to fry and re-fry. Pizza topped with anything you could think of (candy, fried Oreos, shrimp tempura) was popular.

The app was a hit among college students daring one another to eat disgusting foods in order to enter certain fraternities. The UN declared the app a crime against humanity in 2027 and it was subsequently removed from app stores. It still exists on the dark net.

AutoNews

The AutoNews app was an attempt by foreign powers (who, exactly, no one knows) to corrupt social media. AutoNews would take any two events that happened simultaneously and link the two. AutoNews would then create a fake news article tying together these two unrelated events.

AutoNews required no actual writing or researching. It followed a fairly predictable formula, which allowed critics to easily discern AutoNews articles from the slightly less predictable formulas.

People who did not understand the difference between correlation and causation latched onto the AutoNews stories and they spread like wildfire. (And, if you read AutoNews, you might think a Texas wildfire was caused by a haunted house in Bangalore.)

AutoNews began to create mass hysteria as people began to believe everything was caused by everything. While the app eventually became less popular, it still exists, although it is no longer updated or maintained. It is suspected that the app owner died at the same time Mercury entered retrograde in 2028, but no one can say conclusively.

Some people suspect that all news articles are now AutoNews 2.0 articles…a form of AutoNews less predictable than its original version. No one really knows for sure, and no one really cares. Life just sort of went on.