Tapulous

It’s been a little over a week now since our first app became available on the App Store. It feels like a year we’ve been working so much! So now: a quick look back.

It took a couple of days, but Tap Tap Revenge got out of the gates late on Friday, July 11, and it shot up the charts, all the way to the #1 free app on the App Store. Wow. Thanks to everyone who’s downloaded the game, played it, told their friends, and gave us feedback. We’re delighted that people love TTR so much.

If you’re already a Tap Tap Revenge gamer, make sure to get the latest version, which lets you download additional music tracks. We plan to make a lot more music available in the coming days and weeks.

Twinkle was released late on Thursday, and has received very positive initial reviews. It’s already one of the ten most popular social networking apps on iPhone and word is just now beginning to spread.

Not everything has gone as well as we’d hoped.

Twinkle has suffered from several network problems on our end, significant outages at Twitter and both Twinkle and TTR suffered from an almost full-day outage of our file server at Amazon S3. The S3 outage has caused crashes for a number of users that may persist even now that S3 is back (affected users can remove and reinstall the app as a fix). As is the case in most first releases, there are also a number of bugs in Twinkle, mostly minor, that we are in the midst of squashing – stay tuned for Twinkle 1.1 in the coming days!

Most disappointingly, Friend Book was released for a few hours on Friday evening, but we had several mishaps reported with Friend Book’s flagship Handshake feature where people’s address cards were delivered to the wrong person. In response, we’ve disabled the Handshake on the server (any attempts to Handshake will fail) and temporarily removed Friend Book from the App Store.

We know that we are nothing without your trust and support, so we take privacy and reliability very seriously. We have already addressed a number of these issues and taken steps to improve the reliability of our apps and service. We’ve also posted a draft Privacy Policy here on our site, and would love your feedback on it on our Support forums.

Please bear with us as we continue to build great apps and services and address any problems that come up. We are working our hearts out to offer you the best possible experience. This has been an exciting launch for us, but like many others, we’ve experienced glitches as well as terrific successes. We’re looking forward to the challenges ahead.