Jacob Hall, Editor-in-Chief of TapSauce | APPS | 09.11.2012 @ 5:00 pm
Yesterday, GoDaddy (one of the biggest domain registrars and web hosts in existence) suddenly and unexpectedly went down, taking countless sites with it (including ours) and plunging significant portions of the internet into error-ridden darkness. Initially, the attack was blamed on the hacker collective Anonymous, but a single hacker (and member of Anonymous) stepped forward to claim responsibility. Later, GoDaddy reps said that a hacker was not responsible and crash was due to “internal issues.” However, the resolution of the problem coincided with “Anonymous Own3r” tweeting that he was ending his attack, so it remains unclear exactly what went down behind the scenes yesterday. Everything is working fine now, but a lot of people aren’t happy. You can’t be as big as GoDaddy and expect your customers to accept problems that shut down thousands of sites.
Here are some stats for you: there were 46 billion app downloads this year, nearly twice the 25 million downloaded last year. 89% of those apps were free and the vast majority of that remaning 11% were under three bucks. With the exception of niche apps, freemium is the wave of the the future.
What announcements can we expect from Apple at tomorrow’s presentation? This TechCrunch article suggests the obvious (iPhone 5, iPad Mini) and a few not-as-obvious (iOS 6, Facebook integration for Mountain Lion). In addition, here’s a peek at what may or may not be a leaked image of the iPad Mini. I guess we’ll find out tomorrow!
Since we started this post with hacker news, let’s close with hacker news. Last week’s massive UDID leak was initially reported to be a hack of FBI databases. Now, we know this isn’t the truth. An app publisher called Blue Toad claims the leaks came when its security was compromised by the hacker group AntiSec.