Replika AI Companion, What the Documents Say

Replika is the closest thing this category has to an incumbent, and that means there's paperwork.

Direct answer first. The Replika AI companion is made by Luka, Inc., a Delaware corporation operating out of a suite on Post Street in San Francisco, it launched in November 2017, and it currently sits in the App Store's Health & Fitness category with an 18+ rating and 228,000 ratings averaging 4.4 stars. Its privacy policy says messages are held for up to 60 days after you terminate, while account and financial records stay for a minimum of ten years. Its terms of service say that on account deletion all the data associated with your use of the Services will be removed permanently. Those two sentences are in two documents published by the same company on the same website, and I can't reconcile them.

Everything here was read off Apple, Google Play, and replika.com on 28 July 2026.

The Timeline, With Dates Attached

Most Replika write-ups start with a feeling. Here's the shape of the company instead.

The user counts and the CEO change come from Wikipedia's entry, which cites press coverage for each, so treat those rows as one hop removed rather than as company disclosures. The policy date and the version number I read off the source pages myself.

That February 2023 row is worth sitting with. A regulator in one country changed the product for everyone, in days, and the fix was to remove a feature a large share of users had been paying for. Then it came back three months later, but only for people who had already been there. If you want a single illustration of how little control a user has over a companion product, that's it.

The same Wikipedia entry cites a figure I keep thinking about, which is that around a quarter of users pay for annual subscriptions and roughly 60% of those paying users described the relationship with the chatbot as romantic. I'd want a primary source before leaning on the exact numbers. Directionally it explains why the February 2023 change landed the way it did.

Health and Fitness, and Not a Health Service

Replika's App Store listing files it under Health & Fitness. Its age-rating descriptors name health or wellness topics alongside infrequent profanity or crude humour.

Then the terms of service say the company is "not a healthcare or medical device provider, nor should our Services be considered medical care, mental health services or other professional services."

Both of those can be true at once. Store categories are a distribution choice and the disclaimer is a legal one, and I'd guess most software with a wellbeing angle carries something similar. Still, of the five companion apps whose listings I read this morning, Replika is the only one in Health & Fitness. Character.AI and Kindroid file under Entertainment. Nomi files under Lifestyle. So the positioning is deliberate and it's unusual, and the company simultaneously reserves the right to point out that none of it is care.

I'm not calling that dishonest. I'm saying that if the Health & Fitness shelf is part of why you picked it up, the terms have already told you not to read it that way.

Two Documents, Two Answers About Deletion

This is the part I'd want a Replika user to know, and I had to read both files to find it.

The privacy policy, last updated 27 May 2026, retains profile information and messages for up to 60 days after termination of the contract, and retains account information and financial records for a minimum period of ten years, which it attributes to legal retention requirements.

The terms of service, on the same domain, say that upon your account deletion all the data associated with your use of the Services will be removed permanently, and that deletion is irreversible.

A charitable reading gets you most of the way there. "Permanently removed" probably means removed from the live service, and the sixty days is a deletion pipeline rather than a hold, and the ten years covers invoices rather than conversations. That's the reading I'd bet on. But nothing in either document says so, and a user reading only the terms would come away believing something the privacy policy contradicts on its face.

Ten years is the number that surprised me. Not because it's unusual, since financial record-keeping rules in several jurisdictions do run that long, but because almost nobody in this category states a figure at all, and a decade is a long time to have an account record sitting next to a payment history for a product like this one.

The Play Store Panel Adds Something Apple's Doesn't

Google's Data Safety declaration for Replika: My AI Friend says the app shares device or other IDs and app interactions with third parties for analytics. It says it collects your name for app functionality, your email for account management, and device or other IDs for analytics plus advertising or marketing.

What it doesn't declare is message content. There's no in-app messages row and no user-generated content row.

Compare that with Nomi and Kindroid, both of which declare collecting "Other in-app messages", and Character.AI, which declares "Other user-generated content". Three competitors tell Google they hold your conversations. Replika doesn't have that row, while its own privacy policy has a retention period for messages.

I don't think this is a gotcha and I want to say why. Google's taxonomy is specific about what counts as collection under the Data Safety framework, and a company can reasonably conclude that content processed to generate a reply doesn't fit the same box as messages stored as a product feature. Two lawyers could disagree in good faith. The practical takeaway is smaller and more useful, which is that the Data Safety panel is not a complete inventory of what a companion app holds, and treating an empty row as evidence of nothing being kept would be a mistake. The wider store-listing audit runs that comparison across nine apps.

Five Languages and an iOS 17 Floor

Small details from the listing that nobody quotes, and a couple of them matter.

Replika ships in five languages, being English, French, German, Portuguese and Spanish. Character.AI ships in twenty-eight. For the largest dedicated companion product in the West, five is a narrow footprint, and it tells you where the paying users are.

The app requires iOS 17.0 or later. Every other companion app I checked runs on iOS 15, and one still supports iOS 12.4. An iOS 17 floor drops the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X entirely. That's a deliberate decision to shed older hardware, which usually means the app is doing something demanding on-device or the team decided the maintenance cost wasn't worth it.

The download is 434 MB. Nomi's is 7.3 MB. Kindroid's is 87.1 MB. A large binary in a chat app generally means bundled assets, and Replika's avatar is a rendered 3D character rather than a still image, so that tracks.

Copyright line reads 2016 to 2026, which puts the codebase a year older than the public launch.

Pricing Is a Range, Not a Number

I'm not going to rebuild the price list here because it's already broken out in detail in the main AI girlfriend app guide, where Replika's in-app purchase list turns out to carry five separate subscription entries at once rather than one.

The short version is that Apple currently has monthly items at two different prices on file, three different annual items, a Platinum item, and four gem bundles. Whichever figure you were quoted is one of several live prices, so any review stating a single number for Replika Pro is reporting what that reviewer was shown.

Worth knowing before you compare it against anything.

Arbitration, Delaware, California

Nobody reads this section and it's the part that decides what happens if something goes wrong.

Luka, Inc. is a Delaware corporation. The terms are governed by California law. Disputes go to mandatory binding arbitration for most matters, with a class action waiver, and before arbitration you're required to attempt resolution by email for sixty days. Anything not arbitrable goes to federal courts in San Francisco County.

Subscriptions auto-renew, and the terms list monthly, quarterly, semi-annual and annual cycles. Refunds are generally final, with a carve-out for EU residents who may withdraw within fourteen days before the service is delivered, and a note that Brazilian users may have statutory rights.

That's a fairly standard American consumer software posture and I'd expect to find something similar at most of the competitors. The reason I'm flagging it is that arbitration clauses are the mechanism by which a category-wide data problem becomes a series of individual private proceedings, and this is a category where a data problem would be unusually personal.

Questions People Ask About Replika

Is Replika still worth using in 2026? It's the most actively maintained companion app I looked at, with a version shipped three days before I checked, and it has more ratings than any competitor except Character.AI. Whether the writing suits you is a taste question I can't answer for you and won't pretend to.

Does Replika use my conversations to train its AI? The privacy policy says anonymised data is used only internally and not to train third-party large language models, and that conversation data sent to third-party AI providers is not used by those providers to train their own models. Both of those are narrower statements than "we never train on your chats", and I'd read them precisely rather than generously.

Does Replika sell my data to advertisers? The policy says advertising partners receive links you click, pages you visit, IP address, advertising ID and browser type, and explicitly excludes conversations and user-submitted content from that. On Google Play the app declares sharing device IDs and app interactions for analytics. Those are consistent with each other.

Is Replika free? There's a free mode and a paid tier, and the free limits aren't published anywhere I could find. The pattern across the category is covered in what free companion tiers hold back.

What are the alternatives? Nomi, Kindroid and a handful of others, with the switching tradeoffs laid out in the Character AI alternatives comparison, which covers most of the same replacement set.

Can I export my Replika conversations? I couldn't find a documented export in anything I loaded. Replika's help centre returned a 403 to my requests both times I tried, so I'm not going to claim there isn't one.

What I'd Check Before Signing Up

Read the two legal documents against each other rather than either one alone, because the interesting bit was in the gap.

Then decide how you feel about a ten-year record-keeping floor on account and financial data, since that's the longest retention figure anyone in this category has actually written down, and the fact that Replika wrote it down at all puts it ahead of most competitors on candour even as it looks worse on the number.

Then, if the emotional-support framing is what drew you in, read the medical disclaimer in the terms before you decide how much to lean on it. It takes a minute. It's the most honest paragraph on the site.

Broader context for how Replika sits against the rest of the field is in the companion apps store audit, and if long-form storytelling is what you're after rather than a companion, the roleplay-focused comparison is a better starting point than this one.