So Flappy Bird is gone. Pulled it down myself last night around 9, actually, well, "pulled it down" isn't right, I mean I watched it disappear. I'd had it open half the day trying to beat my own high score (17, which is nothing, my coworker Priya is somewhere north of 60 and will not let me forget it) and then the update notice was gone from the App Store entirely. Just gone. Dong Nguyen, the guy who made it, had tweeted a couple days earlier that he was taking it down in 22 hours because it had "become an addictive product" and he didn't want that on his conscience anymore. I honestly thought that was some kind of joke or PR stunt when I first read it. It wasn't.
Fine, whatever, it's a pipe-dodging bird game, the internet will survive without it. Except then this morning I go on eBay out of pure curiosity and it turns out a not-small chunk of the internet has lost its mind.
People are selling their phones. Not the game — the actual physical phone, with Flappy Bird still installed on it, because once you delete it or the phone updates itself there's apparently no way to get it back now that it's off the store. I saw an iPhone 4S listed at $10,000 with a description that basically just said "HAS FLAPPY BIRD, DOES NOT WORK OTHERWISE, DO NOT UPDATE." Somebody else had an old iPod touch up at something like $99,999, which I have to assume was a joke listing or a very confident troll, because come on. But there were dozens of these, not just one or two weirdos: used iPhones, iPod touches, one Android phone with a cracked screen, all priced like they'd been dipped in gold because of one 2MB app sitting on the home screen.
And it's not even like the game is unique anymore. Within maybe six hours of it disappearing, the App Store had a dozen new entries with names like "Flappy Wings" and "Flappy Plane" and one truly shameless one called just "Flappy Dragon," clearly slapped together over a weekend by people trying to catch the wave of downloads before anyone noticed they weren't the real thing. Half of them probably didn't exist a week ago. That's the part that actually annoys me a little, not the eBay stuff, which is at least funny in a dumb way. The clone rush feels like the App Store working exactly as designed and not in a good way — total free-for-all, zero friction between "app gets attention" and "fifty knockoffs appear," and Apple's review process apparently fine with all of it as long as nobody's using a trademarked name.
What I keep thinking about, though, is how many people I've seen this week specifically turning off auto-update and refusing to connect their phone to wifi so it won't sync and somehow revoke the app. I don't actually know if that's how iOS licensing works, probably it doesn't matter either way, the app's already on the device, but the behavior itself is the interesting bit. People treating a free game like a perishable good, hoarding it like it's going to spoil. It's a weird little glimpse of how attached people get to something that, three weeks ago, none of us had even heard of. This thing came out back in May of last year and just sat there quietly with basically no downloads until some YouTubers and a few viral tweets set it off in January. Then it was the most downloaded free game in like 140 countries. Then the guy who made it decided he hated what it had turned into and killed it himself, which, credit to him, is not the move most people make when something's printing money.
Anyway I still have it on my phone. Battery's at 12% and I'm eyeing the charger like it owes me money, because I am absolutely not plugging this thing in and syncing anything until I've figured out if that's actually a risk or if I've just talked myself into main character paranoia over a bird game. Priya says I'm being ridiculous. She's probably right. I'm doing it anyway.