The Mission to Save「Domino's App feat. Hatsune Miku」

[Music] over the past two years I've spent a lot of time and energy thinking about the Domino's app featuring Hatsune Miku commercial once your pizzas delivered have some fun with Miku that commercial is still to this day my favorite YouTube video of all time which is why it's hard to process that my documentary about its disappearance has now received more views than the original video did but for all the discussion we've done of the commercial itself one thing that we've spent remarkably little time talking about is the app [Music] which is a little strange if you think about it the whole point of the ad we fell in love with the ad that brought Scot president of Domino's Pizza into our lives the point of it was to advertise this iOS app Domino's app featuring Hatsune Miku now in part the reason you haven't seen me talk much about this app before is because it's gone now like all 32-bit iOS applications the app disappeared completely from the App Store when Apple discontinued support for them so at this point the app is dead as a matter of fact when this promotion ended Domino's went to great lengths to bury all of it and that original commercial wasn't the only victim if you watch the commercial as many times as I have then you no doubt remember the part where Scott mentions these amazing Vocaloid songs have been created with the fantastic imagination of the crews from all over Japan and those songs really were made like Scott says the challenge was successfully carried out and each of those songs were uploaded to the Domino's Japan YouTube channel as standalone music videos but now most of those videos are gone to recap here Domino's removed the commercial removed most of the music videos from the campaign and they even removed the beautiful Miku Domino's Jaypee website created in celebration of the promotion now as sad as all of these things disappearances are the website fortunately is one of the few things that we still have a backup of all thanks to the heroes at the archive.org Internet Archive see archive.org god bless them still have a nearly complete capture of the website as it stood back in 2013 and virtually all of its interactivity is still intact even today this website is incredible it runs down the applications full feature set has images of the Hatsune Miku branded pizza boxes and delivery moped that they created and even has a little Miku that pops up from behind the page as you're scrolling down by the way I did a little digging and it turns out the hidden PNG of Miku here has some disembodied fingers that you can't normally see so I guess at one point she was supposed to look like she was peeking over the edge of the page using her hands but that didn't make it into the final cut consider that an obscure miko discovery call me super Miku broth anyways for years now this website provided by archive.org has been the closest you can get to revisiting the Miku apps glory since the app is now again completely dead but what if it wasn't what if the app wasn't dead if there was a way to engage in some Vocaloid necromancy and bring Domino's app featuring Hatsune Amy q back from beyond the grave this is an idea I'd contemplated before over the years but the first time I really began taking it seriously was back in November when I received an Instagram message from a kid who goes by the name brick brick told me that he and his friends were attempting to get their hands on the Miku app by any means possible and if their plan was to attempts to use an iPhone 4s and a Japanese iCloud account to do it now when I heard from brick I was impressed this was the first I'd heard of anybody actually trying to jump through all the necessary hoops to revive the app so I offered to help them out and as it turns out I personally had a very important piece of the puzzle to bring back the Miku app see as noble as bricks attempts to get the app were him and his friends needed some assistance as we all know the app is gone now meaning that you can't just take an old 32-bit iPhone and go download from the App Store the usual way but despite dominoes removing the app from the App Store it turns out that the code for the Domino's app is still hosted on Apple servers just sitting there and with a little bit of trickiness we can access that see way back in 2013 when the Domino's app featuring Hatsune Miku first came into being I fell in love with the commercial right away and naturally my instinct was to set up a Japanese iTunes account switch to the Japanese App Store and install onto my phone Domino's app featuring Hatsune Miku and in hindsight this decision I made seven years ago too impulsively download the app turned out to be the linchpin of this entire operation because the moment I installed that app that was the moment that Apple assigned me a license for the app allowing me to redownload it infinitely now there was still a major issue because of its age because of how it was developed this app could only be installed on an older iPhone that supported 32-bit applications that hasn't been true of iPhones for years now slowly I realized that if I was gonna get my hands on this app I only had one option out of options and desperate for some sort of resolution I knew what I had to do so I went to ebay and bought myself an iPhone 5 in search of answers [Music] eventually that iphone5 arrived and I was thrilled and not only because the iPhone 5 is hands-down the best iphone apples ever designed by a longshot not even close I mean look look at these chamfered edges but no the reason I was excited was because if everything went according to plan here we could be about to boot up the Domino's app featuring Hatsune Miku for the first time in seven years excitedly I charged up the phone connected to the Internet signed in open up my past purchases and frantically typed in the four most important letters in the English language and lo and behold there she was Domino's app featuring Hatsune Miku with a big beautiful free download button sitting right next to it now I was overjoyed but cautiously so for some reason a part of me still felt convinced that somehow this wasn't going to work I knew that despite how far we'd come all it would take was one error message to halt this whole operation dead in its tracks at the same time getting this far was promising so I had to try [Music] I press the download button and nothing happened the icons spun in place seemingly thinking about working but the download did not start alone formed in my throat where we too late had we waited too long maybe Apple had cleared all the old 32-bit applications off their servers it would it would make sense i sat there unblinking staring at this icon and then right when I really started to freak out the download began and before I even had time to react it was done and that download progress indicator shifted into the word open my hands were shaking I couldn't believe this was happening I pressed the open button turned up my speakers and then I cannot describe how good this felt that sound the Domino pizza jingle from the commercial seemed at the time like the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard in my life I opened the app and began exploring and as I did I began to feel down on his pizza crew from all over in Japan overwhelmed which felt a little silly because technically none of this was new to me I had of course opened this app before long ago but when I first started up this app seven years ago I didn't yet know the effect that Domino's app featuring Hatsune Miku was going to have on my life I didn't know that the apps commercial would end up eventually being my favorite YouTube video ever and I definitely didn't know that one day I'd end up flying to Tokyo and visiting Domino's Japan HQ in search of answers or that that first trip visiting Tokyo in search of answers would be followed by many many more so yeah to hold the app that started all of this in my hands again it got to me eventually I continued exploring every nook and cranny of the app some parts of the app worked and some of them didn't tragically the augmented reality camera arguably the apps flagship feature would just crash every time I opened it unfortunately the same thing would happen to me with the apps music player meaning this songs from the YouTube videos that Domino's demolished were not accessible through this method most interesting of all and you might have spotted this before there was a recurring error message in Japanese that popped up over and over that I couldn't read lucky for me my roommate was born in Japan and it's fluent in Japanese so I brought the message to her hey well can you read some Japanese for me this error was baffling to me obviously I was connected to the Internet as I just used the Internet to download this app minutes earlier but after nosing around in the app a little bit more I soon began to suspect that this error message was a misnomer that it wasn't the connection to the Internet that was the problem but the connection to a specific server in all likelihood a Domino's server that has long since shut down in essence the Domino's app has always online DRM it is truly the Diablo 3 of Pizza ordering apps despite these shortcomings the mission seems like a success I now had the app but I'm just one man one point of failure standing between Domino's app featuring Hatsune Miku and the app fading back into obscurity I knew that I needed to do everything in my power to ensure that Domino's app featuring Hatsune Miku lives on forever that even if Apple Yanks it from their servers some day it's still out there circulating around the internet for eternity so I reconnected with brick and together we managed to extract the app as an IPA file which is Apple's proprietary file format for iOS apps now this was major for two reasons one it's the first step in getting this app back in the hands of the general public where it belongs and 2 it enables us to crack the app wide open and take a look at what's inside see as it turns out IPA files are just zip files by another name meaning it's trivial to open the application up and get all up inside it skully works and after getting inside I discovered some truly wonderful stuff in there there's this thank you for ordering please wait for delivery image that we could never see otherwise there's this lovely limited-time background that would appear in the app of a beach where someone presumably Miku has adorably drawn the Domino's logo in the sand but also perhaps best of all I found mp3s of all four Pizza themed Hatsune Miku's songs created exclusively in promotion of this promotion [Music] perhaps these songs existed somewhere else in an even higher quality and I just haven't found them yet but for now I was just happy to have them back and hear them again now I'm not gonna tell you everything that exists inside of this app in part because I want to let you explore it and I don't want to spoil the surprise and also in part because I'm not technically proficient enough to understand all of the unity files and other data that exists in there but I'm confident that when you the viewers get your hands on this stuff you'll be able to uncover some really neat stuff that I wasn't able to heck maybe one of you will even be able to get the camera and a our components functioning again a lofty dream I know but that would be incredible and once you do I hope you send it to twitter.com slash sufferer Miku broths so we can share it with the world yes I decided halfway through this video that I was gonna make that a real Twitter account and yes we only post Domino's Miku related content so hope to see you there [Music] speaking of sharing with the world there was still one major hurdle involved in releasing this app publicly it turns out just having the IPA file isn't enough the file that brick and I had gotten our hands on was encrypted with my Apple information so it would be basically useless to distribute it for months brick and I were stumped on this step and last week I decided that we needed to call in the big guns so I went to Twitter and put out the call announcing that come into possession of a quote beloved old iOS app that is no longer available and I just wanted to know the things I could do with it just a few minutes later I got a few replies from somebody named burrito software a dude who seemed to really know what he was talking about when it came to this stuff I learned a lot from this guy including that in order to decrypt the Domino's Miku app we'd have to jailbreak the phone with the app on it meaning at half to jailbreak my iPhone 5 now my iPhone 5 was running iOS 10 and luckily it's possible to jailbreak phones running iOS 10 all the way up to iOS 10 point three point three which is great news for us so I charged my iPhone 5 once again booted it up check the version and realized the phone I got on eBay was running ten point three point four [Music] now this is the only old iOS device I own and it had just been rendered useless it seemed like we had hit a brick wall but then I remembered a brick wall brick what about brick remember the guy who kicked all this off with his group of friends trying to reclaim the app he might be able to help us so I shot brick a message and sure enough brick actually had an iPad running iOS ten point three point three and with that we were back in business from this point on I introduced brick and burrito to each other and they took the reigns from there but boy oh boy was at a bumpy ride over and over we encountered in major roadblocks detours into shady web sites errors installing the app cracking software trouble side loading the app through the software we were using it was barrier after barrier after barrier and I can't begin to tell you how many paths to getting this app into a distributable state were taken up and then later abandoned it was really disheartening work so much so that I even began asking myself why are we doing this I mean all this effort for a forgotten brazenly promotional app an app that was if we're being honest a half functional shell of its former self now prone to constant crashes and failed server pings heck could had even been abandoned by its own parent company Domino's who decided it wasn't worth the effort to keep it on life support was this really a worthwhile use of our time [Music] and then right as those thoughts began to take hold at 4:10 p.m. last Friday I got two simultaneous messages from brick and burrito [Music] suddenly all at once it was done after jumping through hurdle after hurdle after hurdle we had achieved the unachievable brick with his jailbroken ipad and months of dogged persistence in making this happen burrito with his deep knowledge of sideloading apps in the inner workings of iOS and me with my access to the amico apps license and honestly not much else these three ingredients held by these three specific individuals allowed us to do something that at one point seemed impossible to rescue this beloved app long since delisted from the brink of annihilation together we were able to redownload this old 32-bit app salvaged the IPA file itself and then jump through all the necessary hoops to decrypt that file for distribution on the Internet and the result a painstakingly decrypted version of the app ready for consumption by the general public all that was left was distribution [Music] but the obvious question was how how could we ensure this app would survive forever I racked my brain who would be trust with this monumental task there exists an entity who so valued the preservation of Internet content big or small that they would take up this app under their wing and make sure it lived on indefinitely and then I realized it there was the Internet Archive archive.org them the people responsible for archiving the Miki website and of course millions of others were the only ones I could trust with this task so I reached out to Jason Scott now in addition to working for the Internet Archive Jason runs text files calm and exhaustive archive of the web's earliest message boards and is described by Wikipedia as quote an archivist historian of Technology filmmaker performer and actor I wrote Jason a quick email briefly describing the app's history and the hoops we had to jump through to preserve it and was thrilled when less than two hours later he replied with the following message a link to a dedicated spot on archive.org homepage meant specifically for keeping Domino's app featuring Hatsune Miku alive for the first time in this whole process I breathed a sigh of relief it was done the possibility that this app would be lost within our lifetimes never to be seen again had now been all but eliminated and it felt good to know that alongside Jason burrito brick and all of his friends who began this movement last September we had been the ones to do it so dear viewer I'm delighted to say that yes if you so desire and if you have an iOS device that's compatible with 32-bit apps Domino's app featuring Hatsune Miku can now be yours forever you might have to jump through some hoops to do it get ready to install all 10 gigabytes of Xcode and use it to resign the Miku app under your credentials but if you're anything like me the peace of mind you'll get knowing you've done your part to preserve Domino's app featuring Hatsune Miku will be well worth it looking back on this process the thing I keep coming back to is the fact that all this very nearly didn't happen at all there are so many near misses so many obstacles in our way so many reasons we should not have succeeded or arguably should not have even wasted our time trying but we push through all of that persevered and I think in a small way the world is a little bit better for it [Music] you [Music]

Channel: Nick Robinson

Views: 1,073,870

Rating: 4.960412 out of 5

Keywords: hatsune miku, domino's pizza, domino's app, ドミノ・ピザ, miku, doc, documentary, 初音ミク, Domino's App feat 初音ミク, dominos, president of domino's pizza, ceo, japan, japanese, film, video essay, domino's japan, domino's pizza japan, dominosonline, Order Domino's Pizza with Hatsune Miku!, vinesauce, ytp, featuring, vocaloid, tokyo, iOS 11, app, application, iphone, crypton, deleted, mirror, reupload, reup, ドミノ・ピザ Domino's App feat 初音ミク, Have you heard of Hatsune Miku?, iOS, jailbreak, jailbroken, music

Id: 341IsnWdaT4

Length: 18min 8sec (1088 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ColinC47]

Oh, haven’t they saved it already?

[u/39FJR17]

I watched this a couple months ago, I want it