iPhone astronomy app, SkyVoyager, free today

As the guy at Carina who had to deal with this situation from the other side, here is some feedback:

We have a long history in the astronomy software business, and a good reputation which we want to maintain and protect. Trust me, suspending the one-cent-sale of desktop apps was one of the most difficult business decisions I've ever had to make. The only choice our hosting provider offered was to switch us to a dedicated server (which would have taken several hours), or shutting down our site entirely. It was no choice at all.

I'd like to point out that our iPhone apps remained free all day long. I'm not sure how that fits with your theory about trying to avoid cannibalizing future sales. Apple distributed over 135,000 copies of our apps on Monday, at a total profit of exactly $0 for our company. You can accuse us of many things, but I don't think greed is one of them.

5300+ serial number requests in 3 hours is something we simply did not expect and were not prepared to handle (and which, I should point out, netted us $50). The volume was more than 1000x our normal daily average, and far beyond what I expected in my wildest dreams. I'd previously upgraded our bandwidth and storage to "unlimited" - our 150 emails/hour limit was something I never thought would be a problem. (To be frank, I was unaware of this limit was even part of our TOS agreement. That is nobody's fault but mine.)

I personally emailed upwards of 800 serial numbers to the customers who actually purchased them on Monday before bluehost shut our email down. I also generated 200+ additional serial numbers for every customer who emailed us before the end of the day to complain, after we disabled the automated serial number generator.

Long-term, we'll obviously be making some changes, not the least of which is moving to a new hosting provider. However, we first need to support the several thousand new customers we took on over a 24-hour period two days ago. I'd ask for a little patience in dealing with this unexpected and overwhelming bit of "success."

If you were personally affected Monday, email me privately at support at carinasoft dot com. We'll accomodate you.

Well, to spew some sour grapes...

I went to DL the apps yesterday just before noon PDT and saw the announcement. The odd thing is that the only problem stated was the volume of emails - since there never was an issue downloading the applications themselves.

There's no reason that the company would fail to honor their offer other than realizing they were cannibalizing future sales and wanted to kill the promotion. The hosting issue was a convenient excuse.

iphone: Gives me the message the app is being modified after I try to download it then the app store changes it from free to $14.95.

I couldn't download the iPhone version of SkyVoyager or SkyGazer either: iTunes just told me "Purchase of this item is not currently available." Oh well, at least I got Astronaut Envi OK.

Our Astronaut Envi app has also been available for free all day:

http://itunes.com/app/astronautenvi

Our Space Envi Deluxe app (new version 3.0 just out today!) has been half price during the whole 40th anniversary mission and will continue through the STS-127 space shuttle mission. The sale period will also include the total solar eclipse this Wednesday!

http://itunes.com/app/spaceenvideluxe

I just followed the directions on their website and provided the PayPal receipt number and had the serial numbers sent back to me within the minute.

So I think this is a legit problem and not on purpose or with any ill intent involved.

This is not true. I have purchased their software for 0.01 since they pulled the purchase link. Here's how I did it:

- Enter the full URL for the store01 page into Google search
- Click through to google's cache of that page
- Download and save to local disk that HTML page
- Edit and change the HTML to pay "0.01" instead of the full price
- Load the page locally and click the "buy" link

Their "store01.html" page is just a vector onto a Paypal transaction.

I received my codes within a minute and the download links worked fine immediately.

My conclusion is that they decided that they did not want to continue with the offer but were too dishonest to admit that and instead blamed their internet provider. I think that's a real shame.

Ray.

Why you said that the software was available for mac when your older article in the comments had multiple posts from today saying it had been pulled by 9AM PST is beyond me. Trying getting with it. Especially since it seems everyone but you was aware even after all the fiasco this morning over it.

I have to wait until I get home to get the iPhone app via Wi-Fi.

They had to stop offering the desktop software because their hosting company couldn't deal with the demand. So if you couldn;t get through before you're out of luck unless they're able to offer it again later. :(

But the iPhone software is still free and available, because Apple eats server strain for breakfast.