No business is safe from leaks. Apple knows this well with spy shots of its devices, and a good recent example is the premature release of the GTA 6 trailer due to an early leak. But these leaks are one thing and the other is what happened recently with Apple.
A leak of TestFlight files is spreading across Networks, the service the company uses to manage the use of beta versions of App Store apps. Among them, and I am not exaggerating, thousands and thousands of beta applications that have gone through TestFlight over the last 15 years.
More than 76,000 game prototypes and betas, in the air: what happened to this “teraleak”
We could be facing the biggest leak Apple has seen in a long time: we’re talking about terabyte-scale data. This is why the leak was named “Teraleak”. It all started on the Wayback Machine, the Archive.org section where you can see what a website looked like in a given year.
Just here, an anonymous person or group of people located a huge amount of files in the TestFlight service, between the years 2012 and 2015. These are beta versions, prototypes of applications that were fully developed and launched at the time or that were left in the “limbo” of this phase of development. forever. We are talking about over 76,000 executable .IPA files from many companies.
Among these executable applications we can find several unreleased versions of Angry Birds, rejected applications like a Game Boy Advance emulator for iOS that managed to appear briefly in the store, or applications for internal use from companies like Tesla. A real treasure for those who like to keep old versions of mobile applications.
If you want to check out the leak, you’ve split it into three different links on the Wayback Machine site (first, second, third), although if you want to browse just the executables, you have this search engine that the Syrupyy site has spear .
“Insurance” against the withdrawal of applications for professional reasons
This leak is undoubtedly a wake-up call for TestFlight’s systems. But at the same time, it’s a Christmas present for those looking to grab games from what I like to call the “golden age” of the App Store.
The best example is the one that the Rovio company itself left us. The classic version of Angry Birds, which maintains a much gentler payment philosophy like that which reigned on the App Store ten years ago, has been “camouflaged” to take advantage of modern versions which contain purchases and/or more integrated subscriptions. Leak sheds light on more of these older versions.
Rovio has every right to do this, I have no doubt. But users can also benefit from being able to use older versions, recovering them with this leak if they have been removed from the App Store.
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