An Overview of the .app TLD

.app is Killing It

Quick Stats About .app

The .app TLD is a “new generic top level domain”

  • Generic TLDs (often referred to as GTLDs) are TLDs consisting of three or more letters (as opposed to country code TLDs, which are just two letters and are often referred to as ccTLDs).
  • “New” generic TLDs (often referred to as NGTLDs) are newly introduced TLDs as part of ICANN now allowing TLDs in addition to the original six (.edu for education, .com for commercial, .org for non-profit orgs, .net for networks, .gov for governments, and .mil for military).

The .app TLD is owned by Google

  • Google purchased the .app TLD in an ICANN auction in February 2015 for $25 million, setting a record high price for a NGTLD.
  • Since .app is owned by Google, you can be confident you have a stable domain name:
    • World-class back-end infrastructure with the highest speeds and perfect uptime
    • No funny business (see thedarksideof.io)
    • No risk of your TLD being changed (see article about .io uncertainties)
    • No country-level forced requirements (see article about .za domains being required to link to South Africa’s government covid-19 website).
The .app TLD was offered to the public just over a year ago
  • Google opened up .app to the public on May 1, 2018. For the first week of public availability, .app domains were offered through a Dutch Auction, where the most excited buyers can pay an additional fee to register a domain on an earlier day.
The .app TLD has been insanely popular
  • There were over 200 thousand registrations of .app in the first week of general availability, and now there are over 680 thousand registrations.
  • The level of development has outpaced any other new top level domain. 

The .app TLD is one of only a few TLDs that is part of the HSTS Preload List

  • This means that .app domains are required to have an SSL certificate to be used. This means that by default, .app domains are more secure than other TLDs, including .com

How to Get a .app Domain

Registering a new .app

  • We recommend Google’s registrar! Google owns .app, they’re a trustworthy/reliable registrar, pricing is $14/year, and they offer free SSL certificates.
Buying a .app from an existing registrant
  • Many .app owners have landing pages with contact info, so the first step in trying to secure a domain that you like, if it’s already registered, is to visit the domain in your browser.
  • If you don’t have any luck visiting the domain, you can check the popular domain name exchanges to see if the owner has listed the name for sale. A great resource that we’d recommend is dofo.com. This site allows users to search for already-registered domain names, and will tell you if they’re for sale on any of the various domain name exchanges.