Apple app store vanity urls unveiled in ‘Star Trek: Into Darkness’ Super Bowl ad

Among the tech companies that rolled out adverts during The Superbowl (the advertisers take it as seriously as the football fans) was Apple. During the extravaganza we did however get a glimpse of a new Apple product.

During a promo for the upcoming Star Trek: Into Darkness, it was revealed that the Cupertino-based tech giant now has vanity urls for the app store. At the end of the ad, Paramount flashed the url for the film’s promo app. Rather than the usual array of seemingly random numbers and letters, appstore.com/startrekapp came up.

As Cnet notes, the function is already similar to what Apple offers through its iTunes links. One crucial difference however is that people can easily remember these links later. They’re also easier to type into a mobile browser, although the idea that most people would go that way around rather than just searching the app store on their phones seems a little daft.

That said developers can choose to plug their company name in after appstore.com to do a search for multiple apps. If you’re a specialist app builder, it provides a really simple means of showing off your portfolio on the fly. Under the new guidelines, developers can also tweak their urls for iOS and Mac apps.

Cnet also points out an interesting piece of trivia relating to the appstore.com domain. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff bought the domain as a personal gift to the late Steve Jobs, shortly after the store’s introduction in late 2008.