The promise of the Alliance was to keep information free. No mandatory donation required like the other groups. Going on six years later we have stuck by that promise. We have released three different apps to keep Note 7 alive. Each app was in response to our methods being countered. We have also released a temp root and permanent root for the Note 7 Snapdragon. All of this is free, like our promise. It wouldn’t be possible without a small team of moderators, and dedicated people.
Today, the Shield app is very different, it is now used for business management and open to any Android device. We have kept our free promise and for the most part the community has responded in kind. However, there will always be people who take advantage.
About a year ago during a routine system check we noticed an abnormal number of logins by ONE account. After investigating this account, we noticed it had close to 1,000 devices registered. We decided to check for other accounts that were abusing the system. The top 10 accounts had close to 20% of the registered devices assigned to them. These accounts were clearly people using our free app for gain. We tried to contact the accounts with no luck and then banned them. We also setup better monitoring for abuse and quickly noticed they were making new accounts each time we banned their account. People are still trying to login to these accounts a year later.
After a while of playing whack-a-mole, the device limit was created to stop this behavior. Each account can only have two devices registered to them. This creates a problem; I have a family of five so I would need three accounts. Who wants to remember logins for three accounts? After much discussion and thought we are implementing a plan where you can buy extra devices for your account.
The next problem we never thought we would have is, traffic levels. We average close to 80 million requests a month with huge traffic spikes taking that over 100 million requests a month. We have done everything we could to keep costs down, but we needed to upgrade the servers and database to handle the load.
Our generosity can only dig into our pockets so far. Rising hosting costs for the past six years have reached breaking point for us. Remove features to lesson the load on the servers or introduce ads?
Fortunately and unfortunately ads were introduced and they are covering the cost of the servers. This will allow us to focus on adding more features to the Shield and making the app even better.We know people hate ads, we do too, that is why we have an adblocker in the Shield. If you want to support us and disable ads we are also adding an option to do that.
We may introduce paid add-ons, but the core app will always be free, we are standing by our promise.
If you have a need for many devices (10+) on one account, contact us and we can work out an arrangement.
-AllianceX