Mikey Campbell
On Monday, pop culture icon Kim Kardashian publicly apologized for breaking the iOS App Store by launching her "Kimoji" emoji app to a crush of customers that supposedly proved too great a load to bear for Apple's servers. A day later, Apple confirmed Kardashian was mistaken.
A master of social media, Kardashian told her 38.1 million Twitter followers that she "broke the App Store," or intimated as much, no less than four times on Monday. Specifically, a number of fans looking for Kimoji, an app that lets users copy and paste custom Kardashian-themed characters into messages, were having trouble finding it on the App Store.
In true new media form dozens of online outlets glommed onto the story, parroting Kardashian's tweets and adding what later proved erroneous claims.
Gossip site TMZ, for example, fanned the flames with a report claiming Kardashian's $1.99 Kimoji app at one point generated 9,000 download requests per millisecond. Without citing a source, the site said it was told Apple's tech team "swooped in and shored [the App Store] up so it didn't fully crash," a statement seemingly bolstered by a follow-up Kardashian tweet.
Apple denied the many reports and Kardashian's own claims in a statement to TechInsider, saying "there were absolutely no issues with the App Store yesterday." The company also debunked the entirety of TMZ's coverage of the day's events.
In spite of — or more likely thanks to — yesterday's media firestorm, Kimoji is sitting at the top of Apple's iOS App Store charts for paid iPhone apps after only one day of availability.
Marko Zivkovic
Wesley Hilliard
Oliver Haslam
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39 Comments
9000 per millisecond. So about 9,000,000 a second. Or 540 million downloads a minute. Yep…
Oh come on, like she knows what a millisecond is. If she thinks it's 1 millions seconds, I'd believe the download claim.
She reported clearly falsified and trumped* up claims, and she gets media coverage. If you lack a certain ethical foundation—which clearly doesn't literally reside in one's ass or she's be the fucking Ghandi Lama Theresa—this marking works… but we can choose to not report it, as well as when it is reported, by us readers not commenting on it (yes, I see the hypocrisy in me posting about not posting).
* Now I know how the Trump family got their surname¡
How do such emoji work? Is it just an in-line graphic? I thought new emoji had to go through the "emoji board" or something.