It's easy to forget just how long people have been making great apps and games for the iPhone's App Store, but it's also easy forget just how many of those bits and bytes are no longer available for download. Some of them were updated and older versions became obsolete, while some just disappeared for whatever reason. But for a lucky few — more than a few, in fact — there might be a lifeline.
That lifeline comes in the form of a giant leak, dubbed 'teraleak,' that has seen thousands of iPhone apps and games appear on the Internet Archive. They're from a period of years between 2012 and 2015 and appear to have been TestFlight beta builds that were stored on incorrectly configured servers that opened them up to scraping. And now they're all available for download for free.
But while this is a huge deal for those who worry that we are losing a generation of software due to the lack of any physical media, it's less interesting for those of us who just want to play an old game that we miss from the good old days — these games won't work on modern iPhones, unfortunately.
TestFlight downloads
TestFlight is the system that Apple offers app developers by way of a system for managing beta testing. It allows apps to be downloaded outside of the App Store before they're ready for public consumption, and it is actually software that Apple bought back in 2014. Before then, the whole thing was a web service and it appears that might have been what made this leak possible.
First reported by Eurogamer, the leak contains a plethora of beta versions of some of the world's most famous apps and games including Instagram and, of course, the Angry Birds series. Infinity Blade 2 is also present, too. And while actually wading through the leak isn't as easy as it could be, one X account relating to the so-called teraleak has been picking through things.
With so many of our favorite apps and games present it does remind us that we might never again get the chance to play some of the games from such a golden age in mobile gaming. But that could one day change and now there are tons of games just waiting to be played.
App preservation
People have been collecting software for as long as it's been around but while shelves of game boxes are easy to come by, that isn't the case with things downloaded from digital app stores, including Apple's own. And when you can't put a cartridge into a game console and play it, as you can with an old Game Boy, you're left wondering what will happen to the hits of yesteryear.
Leaks like this are a real boon for those who collect digital versions of titles like Cut the Rope, for example, but we're still a ways off being able to play these titles. That could change in the future, of course, and actually having the software to hand is a key part of that.
For now, all we can do is wonder at the fact that what appears to have been a misconfigured Amazon cloud server seems to have brought some huge games back from the dead, even if we can't actually play them ourselves.
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