Last edited on Dec-05-2025 at 10:22 PM (UTC 3 Nineveh, Assyria)
shlama/shlomo! i am trying to find a (unfortunately deleted) ios quiz game i played when i was younger named mele by swedish developer simon yildiz. (i'll explain the "find" part later in the post) what is "mele"?
the app was a quiz game for classical syriac, specifically the western dialect and worked like this:
when you selected a category of words, it would give you a picture of a word, and then three classical syriac words below. you had to guess the correct word in under ten seconds. if you let the time run out, you automatically get the question wrong. at the end, you would get 0-13 stars and a certain amount of points based on how well you did.
what i've done:
search archive.org, 4pda, etc.:
none of the websites above to my knowledge have a copy of the .ipa files uploaded. make multiple posts on reddit about it:
no one responded and if they did thay either said something like "wow man that sucks" or "why do you want this app?" not understanding how lost media works. created a subreddit for finding it but i deleted the account i made it, so there's currently no mods since literally no one used it. ask the dev directly on linkedin:
dev did not have the files for the game, however he did say the song that played in the title screen was "leshono d'umtho" which means "the nation's language", and that he was not planning to remake/rerelease the game. checking my old ipad/computer for backups:
ipad did not have the app installed and had no backups, however i did find a backup of the images taken on it from 2012 to 2016 on my computer, and it did have a screenshot of the title screen that i took on june 3, 2016, but apart from that, it didn't have much. what i know:
the app got around 1,000 downloads on the app store by october 2014 (thanks to a post on the apps official facebook page) it was released on august 18, 2014 and was deleted around 2020 (the last time i downloaded it was around 2018-2019, and it disappeared from the store around 2022. the game was inspired by a supposed old swedish language web-game called "St. Efrem's Word Game" which ironically is also lost. why is mele so important anyway?
the reason the game was so important is because not only was it one of the only ios games to teach syriac that wasn't of a mediocre quality, but it was also one the first of it's kind. if it app is deleted, how can you help "find it"?
if an app is deleted from the ios app store, but it's still downloaded on an old device, the app will remain on the device and in most cases will still be playable. how you can help find it: asking people who may have played it if they still have it installed on their old device (like on facebook). searching on your old device/backups if you installed it (if you are that really rare person that downloaded it). if you do mange to find it, watch his video on how to extract .ipa files from ios devices (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQONRrwcSnk) and then upload it to archive.org. you could also just continue searching through archive.org to see if it was uploaded (i may have just missed it my first time around, but i'm quite certain it's not on 4pda.) please help me find this thing, it's been my obsession for so long and i just want to have closure. links:
facebook page:
www.facebook.com/MeleApp/ online news article talking about it:
www.bahro.nu/sv/identitet/sprak/mele-appen-som-lar-dig-arameiska/ screenshot i took back in 2016:
imgur.com/a/mele-screenshot-a8rDjKH
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