The Internet Archive is Coming Back Online and So are our Gaming Apps

 

About 1 month ago UserLAnd Technologies' apps which allow you to play retro games on Android stopped working.  The reason for this is that these apps act as a sort of browser extension for what the Internet Archive has archived.  The apps provide a way to meaningfully use these games on Android, but we don't host the games ourselves.  This generally works well but the Internet Archive suffered multiple attacks (DDoS, databases hacked and website defaced) at the beginning of October.  The end result was that all of their services went offline.  The team at the Internet Archive prioritized getting the Wayback Machine and other services working before they restored their collection of games.  The good news is that the games (and other sw) are now back online.  Their blog has a summary of what is working currently.  I am guessing we will see some slowness and some random outages as they continue to restore and improve their services, but I am relaunching all of the apps today.  If the apps work well, please consider updating any negative review you may have left.  If they do not, please reach out to support@userland.tech .

So, what is going to be done to prevent long outages in the future.

1. We increased our general giving to the Internet Archive.
2. We have reached out to the Internet Archive to see if we can specifically sponsor them making a fallback read-only copy of their SW library.  We haven't received a reply, but they are probably pretty swamped right now.
3. We are updating our apps to only use the version of the game cached on your device unless there is no cached version or that version is corrupt.  The previous version of the app would use the cached version if internet was not available or the website was completely unresponsive, but could not handle an error page being displayed instead of the expected contents.
4. We have some other potential plans, but they are longer term and will take a lot of work to put in place.  Regardless, we want you to know we are trying to make things better.

Lastly, in compensation for your patience and your frustration (yes, we know some of you were pretty upset)... for the next month we will give away promo codes for any of our apps (up to 500 per total per app).  To get a promo code, please email support@userland.tech with the name of the app(s) you would like a promo code for.

Thanks,

Corbin Champion

Owner and Lead Developer