On July 13, 2012, Mixed Media Labs announced that App.net would change its purpose to be an ad-free social networking platform.

[9] On November 21, 2013, App.net announced Broadcast, a way for users of the App.net service to send and receive push notifications about the things they care about.

As part of the freemium model Broadcast is free to members of the App.net service with channel analytics available to App.net users with a developer-tier account.

The first project to use Backer originated from App.net itself, in which the company asked if they should accept Bitcoin as a form of payment for the paid tiers.

On May 6, 2014, the founders announced that subscription renewals had been so poor that there were no longer funds to retain development staff for App.net and future operations would be on a maintenance-only basis using contractors.

[12] However, due to a significant number of user data export failures that deadline was extended until March 16, 2017.