TechCrunch Didn’t Do the Research (Again) ⇥ techcrunch.com

Sarah Perez of TechCrunch:

Look! Apple just released a new product during the Super Bowl. Actually, it’s a new product for App Store developers – short “AppStore.com” vanity URLs. […]

These new vanity URLs could quickly turn into a land grab in the crowded App Store, which now has some 800,000 mobile applications available in the iOS App Store alone.

A “land grab”, eh? That phrase was in the headline, too, but was removed, though you can still see it in the post slug.

But if Perez (or any editor at TechCrunch) had bothered to read Apple’s developer documentation for the feature before hitting the “Publish” button, they would have known that these are generated by Apple for each app and company, so there will be no “land grab”.

Oh, but this is TechCrunch, so they can’t admit to their mistake like anyone else:

UPDATE: After checking with a couple of App Store developers and sources inside Apple, it sounds like the new vanity URLs will not be able to be configured to whatever the developer wants them to read, but will rather be provided by Apple on the developers’ behalf.

Checking with “sources inside Apple” wasn’t necessary. You could have simply done the required reading in full.