Game preservationists go digging for lost apps in TestFlight teraleak. The Internet Archive as you should know reportedly have versions of Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, and many more from TestFlight.
Game Preservationists TestFlight Teraleak
A significant number of old mobile games as well as apps from TestFlight, which allows developers to share in-development versions of their apps, have now been discovered on the Internet Archive, as reported by Eurogamer. The 1.2TB cache in question, which is being dubbed the “teraleak,” could be a really huge deal for preservationists, especially due to the fact that many older apps are no longer available to download in any form.
The apps as you should know are from “roughly” 2012 through 2015, as per an account on X (formerly known as Twitter) that is focused on the leak. It seems that the apps were scraped from the TestFlight website in the early parts of 2015, and perhaps from misconfigured cloud storage as links on the Wayback Machine include mentions of Amazon’s CloudFront as well as S3 services for AWS.
What is TestFlight
Just before it was acquired by Apple in the early parts of 2014, TestFlight allowed developers to test apps on both iOS and Android. As per the description of the archive, Apple reportedly shut down the old TestFlightApp.com website back in February 2015 and the cache was uploaded to the Internet Archive by Archive Team back in March 2015 and it seems to have gone significantly unnoticed since then. Apple as well as the Internet Archive did not reply to requests for comment immediately.
People Are Already Putting Together Mediums to Easily Sort Through the Archived Apps
People are already putting together mediums to more easily sort through the archived apps, and there is even a Discord community that is currently digging through the archives as well. You however will not be able to just load one of these old apps on your current phone and then revisit the past, as the packages in question will not run on modern phones. But I am really curious as to what people might find as they sort through things on the platform and what fun tidbits might be hidden in old versions of Angry Birds or Cut the Rope.
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