Appulous’ Troll Bridge: Have App store aales gone up?
Section: iPod + iTunes, iPod touch, iPhone, iPhone, iPhone SDK & Apps, Originals
The Appulous website, which allows you to download previously paid-for apps to install on your iPod Touch or iPhone for free, is having some issues with a little bit too much traffic.
If you’re not familiar with the process of obtaining paid-apps at no cost, a site called Appulous allows you to download a .ipa pre-cracked by someone who legitimately purchased it, and then install it on your iDevice for free. Almost any app—from $0.99 flying chicken apps to $99.00 GPS applications—are available. Apple’s tried to prevent users from jailbreaking their iDevices by releasing updates which break the crack, but users aren’t forced to update, and new cracks are usually available shortly after the update is released. But how many jailbroken devices are there? Cydia founder, Jay Freeman, estimates that around 4 million of 40 million iPods and iPhones are jailbroken. How many have used Appulous? According to an admin at the site, “200,000 people using the site normally.”
However Appulous recently created “Troll Bridge” because most people were just leeching off the site and not uploading apps, and because they couldn’t keep up with the traffic they were getting. “The bridge will be removed “Soon,” but for now, questions to which only people who worked on Appulous would know the answer are blocking general access. The questions are things that even pro iPhone and iPod Users won’t be able to figure out, and according to Kyek, the writer of Appulous, that was the goal.
Sample questions include:
- I made a job listing on rent-a-coder for someone to make an Appulous knockoff for my site. Kyek accepted the job under another name and pwned me. But we’re cool now. Who am I?
- I have two Hackulous accounts: My main one, and one I made just for fun. Which is the latter?
Now that you know what’s going on, do you think App sales have gone up? Appulous claims they let users “try before buy,” something that Apple’s App Store doesn’t allow, and they do encourage you to pay for the app after you’ve tried it. So, people who are following that concept aren’t probably buying applications until the troll bridge is removed. But then again, how many people are actually just trying them, and then buying? I’m assuming not very many.
Full Story » | Written by Nicholas Montgomery for Appletell. | Comment on this Article »