installCore

» see installcore.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Nobody ever installed installCore on purpose. That is not a joke about the product, it is the product. You went to download a free media player or an archive tool, you got an installer, and inside that installer was a second business you had no relationship with, selling your machine by the unit to whoever was buying that week.

By 2009 i had been downloading windows freeware for eleven years and had learned to read installer screens the way you read a contract at a car rental desk. The muscle memory of that decade is the same everywhere: find the checkbox, uncheck the checkbox, do not hit the big button, look for the small grey link that says decline. installCore is a large part of why that muscle memory was necessary, and it is worth saying plainly that it was an extremely successful piece of software.

installCore dates to 2009 and ironSource, out of Tel Aviv, put the first public SDK out at the start of 2011, forked from an installer called FoxTab. It was a kit any developer could bolt onto their own download. The developer got paid per install and ironSource took its share, while the offers riding along got the machines they had paid for. As of august 2012 the platform was handling 100 million installations every month, which in a category nobody chooses is a genuinely enormous number.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it worked ~

The technical description in ironSource's own materials is about efficient web-based deployment of application software, which is true and tells you nothing. The working description is a wrapper. Your program went in one end and came out the other with an offer screen bolted to the front of it, and the offer screen was tuned by people whose entire job was raising the acceptance rate.

That tuning is the actual history of the 2010s desktop. Decline buttons rendered grey on grey, with accept as the default state of every checkbox, and terms phrased so that the fast reading and the slow reading do not agree with each other. None of it required breaking into anything, which is exactly why it was so hard for anyone to act against. At every step there was a screen with a choice on it. The choice simply arrived already made.

~ the decline ~

Anti-malware vendors began rating installCore packages as potentially unwanted programs in 2014. Windows Defender followed in 2015. Malwarebytes described it as a family of bundlers that installs more than one application on the user's computer, which is a flat description of what it advertised itself as doing. Other researchers were less neutral and used the word trojan.

Being classified by Defender is close to fatal for a distribution platform, because Defender is not a product a user chooses either. It is already running. Once Microsoft decided this category was unwanted, the developers who had been bolting the SDK onto their downloads started getting support mail about virus warnings, and the economics of the whole arrangement began to unwind from the supply side.

~ the actual end ~

ironSource discontinued installCore in late 2020. The reason is not sentimental. In march 2021 the company announced it was going public by merging with a special purpose acquisition vehicle called Thoma Bravo Advantage, and a business whose flagship product is flagged as malware by the operating system it runs on is not a business you take to public investors. The product was cleared off the books first and the listing followed.

It worked. ironSource listed, and in 2022 Unity agreed to buy the company for around 4.4 billion dollars, a deal that a large number of Unity developers objected to loudly and specifically because of what installCore had been. The product died in 2020 and its reputation kept trading for another two years. Almost nobody who unchecked those boxes for a decade ever learned the name of the thing they were unchecking.

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