Game preservationists dig for lost apps in TestFlight ‘teraleak’
By Jay Peters, a news editor who writes about technology, video games, and virtual worlds. He’s submitted several accepted emoji proposals to the Unicode Consortium.
A huge number of old mobile games and apps from TestFlight, which lets developers share in-development versions of their apps, have been discovered on the Internet Archive, as reported by Eurogamer. The 1.2TB cache, which is being called the “teraleak,” could be a really big deal for preservationists, especially because many older apps are no longer available to download in any form.
The apps are from “roughly” 2012 through 2015, according to an account on X (formerly Twitter) that’s focused on the leak. It appears that the apps were scraped from the TestFlight website in early 2015, perhaps from misconfigured cloud storage; links on the Wayback Machine include mentions of Amazon’s CloudFront and S3 services for AWS.
Before it was acquired by Apple in early 2014, TestFlight let developers test apps on both iOS and Android. According to the archive’s description, Apple shut down the old TestFlightApp.com website in February 2015; the cache was uploaded to the Internet Archive by Archive Team in March 2015 and seems to have gone largely unnoticed since then. Apple and the Internet Archive didn’t immediately reply to requests for comment.
People are already putting together ways to more easily sort through the archived apps, and there’s a Discord community that’s digging through the archives as well. You won’t be able to just load one of these old apps on your current phone and revisit the past, as the packages won’t run on modern phones. But I’m really curious what people might find as they sort through things; what fun tidbits might be hidden in old versions
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