Formerly | Gogo Apps |
---|---|
Type | Subsidiary |
Industry | Video games Computer software |
Founded | February 2008 |
Founders | Bart Decrem Andrew Lacy |
Defunct | January 9, 2014 |
Fate | Shut down; all games removed from App Store |
Successor | Library: Disney Interactive |
Headquarters | , |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people | Bart Decrem (CEO) Andrew Lacy (COO) |
Products | Tap Tap series |
Owner | Disney Interactive (The Walt Disney Company) |
Number of employees | 20 |
Parent | Disney Mobile |
Website | tapulous |
Footnotes /references [1] [2] |
Tapulous, Inc. was an American software and video game developer and publisher headquartered in Palo Alto, California. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company as part of Disney Interactive's Disney Mobile unit. The company's most profitable products were the Tap Tap series of music games, which surpassed thirty-five million downloads. [3]
Tapulous was founded in February 2008 with the specific intention of developing software applications for the iOS platform. The company's Tap Tap Revenge gained at least one million players in less than one month of availability, and was the most-downloaded free game of the App Store in 2008. Building on the success of the game, Tapulous then heavily focused on the Tap Tap Revenge series by expansion and partnership with Universal Records. As of December 2009, the company's sales totaled nearly $1 million per month. [4] In July 2010, the company was acquired by The Walt Disney Company. On January 9, 2014, the company shut down and removed all its remaining games from the App Store.
With the advent of unofficial applications being distributed across the internet, Apple announced the availability of a native SDK for the iOS/iPhone platform in October 2007. [5]
As a reaction to the announcement of the SDK, Tapulous formed in January 2008 with the initial name of "Gogo Apps". Its co-founders were Bart Decrem, an entrepreneur who helped launch the Firefox browser and was the founding CEO of Flock, Inc. and Andrew Lacy, a consultant of McKinsey & Company. The company thereafter changed its name to the current one, and hired developers Nate True and Guy English to develop Tap Tap Revenge as a launch title for the App Store, although the actual release date was eventually several days after the launch of the store. [6] Meanwhile, Layton Duncan and Tristan O'Tierney developed Twinkle as another launch product. [7] Initial investment in the company was provided by Rob Theis in 2007, and later followed by $1.8 million USD, from Andreas Bechtolsheim and Roy Thiele-Sardina via HighBAR Ventures, Marc Benioff, the late Rajeev Motwani, and others. [8]
Within a month of publishing, Tap Tap Revenge, the game became one of the most popular applications available for the iOS, and had over one million players, and was installed on about twenty percent of all iPhone and iPod Touch devices. [9] In December 2008, it was announced that the game was the most-downloaded free game in the App Store for the year. [10] In April, 2009, comScore announced that Tap Tap Revenge was the most-installed app on the App Store. [11] Tapulous continued to release sequels of the game as a part of the Tap Tap series, and has since been involved with major label Universal Records in June 2009 to feature their artists in their games. [12]
On July 1, 2010, Tapulous was acquired by The Walt Disney Company and incorporated into Disney Mobile as a wholly owned subsidiary, part of Disney Interactive Media Group. [13] As of January 7, 2014, Bart Decrem officially resigned as CEO of Tapulous. This was followed days later with an announcement that the Tap Tap apps would be pulled from the iPhone store on January 10 and servers would be shut down by the company some time in February. [14]
Disney Mobile is an American division of Disney Consumer Products, which is in itself a division of The Walt Disney Company, that designs mobile apps, content and services.
Bart Decrem is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who, most recently, headed the Mobile Games business for The Walt Disney Company between July 2010 and the Fall of 2013. He was born and raised in Belgium.
iOS is a mobile operating system developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes the system software for iPads as well as on the iPod Touch devices. It is the world's second-most widely installed mobile operating system, after Android. It is the basis for three other operating systems made by Apple: iPadOS, tvOS, and watchOS. It is proprietary software, although some parts of it are open source under the Apple Public Source License and other licenses.
The iOS SDK, formerly the iPhone SDK, is a software development kit (SDK) developed by Apple Inc. The kit allows for the development of mobile apps on Apple's iOS and iPadOS operating systems.
The App Store is an app marketplace developed and maintained by Apple Inc., for mobile apps on its iOS and iPadOS operating systems. The store allows users to browse and download approved apps developed within Apple's iOS SDK. Apps can be downloaded on the iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad, and some can be transferred to the Apple Watch smartwatch or 4th-generation or newer Apple TVs as extensions of iPhone apps.
The iFund is a US$200 million capital fund. Developers may enter into equity deals for the creation of applications, services, and components for Apple Inc.'s iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad platform. It is being offered and managed by venture capital company Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers (KPCB).
Tap Tap or Tap Tap Revenge was a series of rhythm games by Tapulous available for the iOS of which several versions, both purchasable and free, have been produced. The goal of the game is to tap each of the colored balls when they reach a line at the bottom of the screen. If the ball is hit on the beat, the player gains points, but if not, it counts as a miss. If a player taps the screen without a tapper on the beat, the streak will go back to 0 and a few points will be lost except for 16x. There were also "shakes", which required the player to move the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad to the right, left, or backwards. The apps were pulled from the app store and had their servers shut down in February 2014.
Cydia is a graphical user interface of APT for iOS. It enables a user to find and install software not authorized by Apple on jailbroken iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices. It also refers to digital distribution platform for software on iOS accessed through Cydia software. Most of the software packages available through Cydia are free of charge, although some require purchasing.
Tap Tap Revenge, also known as Tap Tap Revenge Classic was a music game created by Nate True, and developed and published by Tapulous for iOS in July 2008. It is the first game in Tapulous' Tap Tap series. Development for the game began prior to the release of the iPhone SDK, and was originally entitled Tap Tap Revolution. The goal of the game is to tap each of the colored balls when they reach a line at the bottom of the screen. If the ball is hit on the beat, the player gains points, but if not, it counts as a miss. There are also "shakes", which require the player to move the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad to the right, left, or middle.
Riddim Ribbon featuring The Black Eyed Peas is the first installment in Tapulous' series of music games, succeeded by Riddim Ribbon Free. It features three tracks by The Black Eyed Peas plus more tracks that can be purchased from Apple's in-app purchase. Previously Tapulous had created games in the Tap Tap series including Tap Tap Revenge, Tap Tap Revenge 2 and Tap Tap Revenge 3.
OpenFeint was a social platform for mobile games for devices running on Android or iOS. It was developed by Aurora Feint, a company named after a video game by the same developers. The platform consisted of an SDK for use by games, allowing its various social networking features to be integrated into the game's functionality. OpenFeint was discontinued at the end of 2012.
Scoreloop, a subsidiary of BlackBerry, was a cross-platform social gaming network for the operating systems including BlackBerry, Android, Bada, iOS and Windows Phone 7.
Riddim Ribbon Free is the second installment in Tapulous' new series of music games, preceded by Riddim Ribbon feat. The Black Eyed Peas. It features Like a G6 by Far East Movement as a default track. Similar to Tap Tap Revenge 3, there is an in-app store where players can buy premium tracks or redeem them with store credits.
Submissions for mobile apps for iOS are subject to approval by Apple's App Review team, as outlined in the SDK agreement, for basic reliability testing and other analysis, before being published on the App Store. Applications may still be distributed ad hoc if they are rejected, by the author manually submitting a request to Apple to license the application to individual iPhones, although Apple may withdraw the ability for authors to do this at a later date.
Fleksy is a third-party, proprietary virtual keyboard app for Android and iOS devices. It attempts to improve traditional typing speed and accuracy through enhanced auto-correction and gesture controls. Fleksy uses error-correcting algorithms that analyze the region where the user touches the keyboard and feeds this through a language model, which calculates and identifies the intended word. Swiping gestures are used to control common functions, such as space, delete, and word correction.
TestFlight is an online service for over-the-air installation and testing of mobile applications, currently owned by Apple Inc. and only offered to developers within the iOS Developer Program. Developers sign up with the service to distribute applications to internal or external beta testers, who can subsequently send feedback about the application to developers. The TestFlight SDK additionally allows developers to receive remote logs, crash reports and tester feedback.
Crashlytics was a Boston, Massachusetts-based software company founded in May 2011 by entrepreneurs Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert. Crashlytics helps collecting, analyzing and organizing app crash reports.
Infltr, the conflation of "infinite filters" is an image editing app for Apple iOS devices. The first version of the mobile app was launched in August 2015 as an alternative to the standard iOS camera app.
Glassbox is an Israeli software company. It sells session-replay analytics software and services.
The popularisation of mobile games began as early as 1997 with the introduction of Snake preloaded on Nokia feature phones, demonstrating the practicality of games on these devices. Several mobile device manufacturers included preloaded games in the wake of Snake's success. In 1999, the introduction of the i-mode service in Japan allowed a wide variety of more advanced mobile games to be downloaded onto smartphones, though the service was largely limited to Japan. By the early 2000s, the technical specifications of Western handsets had also matured to the point where downloadable applications could be supported, but mainstream adoption continued to be hampered by market fragmentation between different devices, operating environments, and distributors.