Happy .APP day!
On May 8, 2018, a new top-level domain (TLD) .app joins the Internet. I put in bids to get 4 of them.. and managed to score one of them!
Edit: I had planned to post this on May 8, but GoDaddy was so slow to put my last domain name through the auction that I didn’t get the results until this morning (May 9), so this post is a day late!
Edit 2: Apparently I did manage to snag purr.app! See the end of this article for the update.
Google bought the rights to the .app TLD back in 2015 for $25 million dollars. (.com, .net, and .org are other common TLDs you may recognize.) Starting on May 1, 2018, you could register a .app domain name through a number of domain name registrars (such as GoDaddy and Gandi), except there was a catch.
The period from May 1 to May 7 was a “pre-registration” period. You can pay an “Early Access” fee (~$140) to register your domain name before anyone else gets it first. After that, on May 8, the general public can register a .app domain name regularly (for about ~$20).
You can register a .app domain before May 8 and not pay the Early Access fee, but your registration will just be queued until May 8. So, since I’m cheap and didn’t want to pay the Early Access fee, I decided to try my luck and register 4 domain names early to see what I could get on May 8:
meow.apppurr.appwoof.appmeo.app
bark.app was already gone and meo.app was a typo, but it was available so why not! Registering the domains was the fun and easy part, but then the negative news started rolling in.
First, I lost meo.app:
Apparently trademark holders get first-pick on new domain names. (No, I do not know who/what the heck “Meo” is.)
Next, I lost meow.app: (darn, I’m actually kind of sad about this one)
And then I lost woof.app:
On May 8, I anxiously checked GoDaddy throughout the day to see if the last domain name (purr.app) would actually go through. After seeing no results, I eventually hopped on support chat, and they told me that GoDaddy hadn’t processed the domain names yet.
On May 9, I got an email from GoDaddy saying I got purr.app!
So… the question is, what to do with my shiny new domain name?
