Game preservationists dig for lost apps in TestFlight ‘teraleak’

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.

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 of Angry Birds or Cut the Rope?