HQ trivia was pulled from the App Store due to one simple mistake
Startup founders, they're just like us.
HQ — the popular trivia app that almost gave away $25,000 to one lucky winner on Sunday — has been pulled from the App Store due to one tiny, but important mistake. The person behind the company's iTunes developer account forgot to update an expired credit card.
We were alerted to HQ's absence from the App Store by Adam Blacker, communications lead at Apptopia. After looking through the App Store rankings this morning, as part of his work routine, he did not see HQ. We checked and found when you search for "hq" only other trivia games appear:
Turns out the reason wasn't because HQ has collapsed, but rather because it was no longer available.
Data from Apptopia does show its ranking has fallen, however:
We reached out to HQ's team on Monday and were assured that it was a technicality and everything would be back up momentarily.
Haven't we all forgotten when an ID or a credit card expires? I definitely have. We'd hope that a service like iTunes would alert users to that, and it does. But who hasn't also missed an important email?
For what it's worth, HQ trivia is still attracting millions of users per game. Sunday night's pot of $25,000 attracted 1.8 million people by the first question.
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Kerry Flynn is a business reporter for Mashable covering the tech industry. She previously reported on social media companies, mobile apps and startups for International Business Times. She has also written for The Huffington Post, Forbes and Money magazine. Kerry studied environmental science and economics at Harvard College, where she led The Harvard Crimson's metro news and design teams and played mellophone in the Band. When not listening to startup pitches, she runs half-marathons, plays with puppies and pretends to like craft beer.
