Apropos of nothing Flappy Bird floated across my mind today. It struck me odd how little people seem to refer to it now, given how popular it got. I was reading its Wikipedia page; the game was pulling in $50k USD a day and the dev pulled it because he thought it was too addictive. Or possibly because he didn’t feel like he could defend against the claims that he’d ripped off other games and got in over his head. It’s a fascinating story.
But the game itself I never got into. I tried it once on a friend’s phone and quickly had no more interest in playing it. I’m curious to know from people who played it a lot at the time, was it a good game? Does it hold up? Or was it a relatively generic knock-off that got famous because catapulting random ideas into the global consciousness is just a thing the internet does sometimes?
I never thought it was a good game, but I knew it was oddly popular
It was extremely popular. For a while after it got pulled there was a small market for phones in airplane mode that still had a working version of the app. Some of the auctions went into the high five figures.
Which I never understood. You just needed the apk. I only heard of the game after it was pulled. I went online, found one of those apk mirror sites, downloaded it, and installed it. Not sure why they put the phones in airplane mode to sell the phones. Then again I always have my phones set to never auto-update.
IIRC the reasoning was that if the play store / app store synced, the app would be removed from the phone. I think for the vast majority of people, you may as well ask them to cast a spell as ask them to “sideload an APK”, so if they really really wanted to play Flappy Bird and felt that was beyond their capacity, this was the only alternative. Or maybe people thought phones with the “original” app would appreciate in value as collector’s items? The whole thing is mysterious to me.