So Flappy Bird is gone. Dong Nguyen pulled it from the App Store and Google Play a couple days ago, and if you somehow missed the meltdown that followed, congrats on your healthy relationship with the internet. I did not miss it. Nobody with a Twitter account missed it.
Here's the part that actually got me though, and it's not the "why did he take it down" debate everyone's already had forty times this week (personal reasons, he said, wasn't handling the attention well, fine, I believe him, moving on). It's what happened the second it disappeared. People started listing their phones on eBay. Not the app. The whole phone. "iPhone 5, 32GB, has Flappy Bird installed" as the headline, like the bird is a factory feature now, some kind of trim package.
I spent a genuinely embarrassing amount of time last night scrolling through these listings instead of doing literally anything else I was supposed to be doing. Some guy had his iPod touch up with a starting bid of $0.99 and it was already past $200 by the time I found it. I saw one claiming to be an "authentic Flappy Bird iPhone" going for something like $2,000, though I have zero faith that ever actually closed at that number, eBay listings inflate like that constantly and most of them quietly get pulled or relisted lower once the bidding fever wears off. Doesn't matter. The fact that it happened at all is the story.
And look, I get the logic on a purely mechanical level. The app's gone, you can't download it new anymore, so a phone that already has it is suddenly a weird little artifact. Scarcity, whatever, Econ 101. But it's still such a bizarre thing to watch play out in real time over a game where you tap a screen to make a pixelated bird not die on a pipe. I never got past like 14 on that thing. My personal best is a joke compared to what I've seen people post as screenshots, and I'm not even mad about that, I just think the game was designed by someone who hates joy, which I guess was sort of the point.
The other angle nobody's really talking about yet is what this does to app pricing expectations generally. Flappy Bird was free. Free! And it was reportedly pulling in something like $50,000 a day in ad revenue before Nguyen killed it, which is its own kind of insane when you think about how little app there actually was. One background, one bird, some pipes. That's the whole game. And now the free version of it is worth more used-and-installed-on-a-random-phone than most paid apps in the store cost brand new. I don't know what lesson to take from that except maybe that virality doesn't care at all about effort or polish, it just wants to happen to something, and this time it happened to a Vietnamese indie dev who apparently didn't even want it.
I'll say one more thing and then I'll stop, because I could go on. A friend of mine actually tried to sell her old iPhone 4 this week specifically because it still had the app on it, and when I pointed out that she could just, you know, keep using the phone and not sell it to a stranger for the novelty, she looked at me like I'd suggested something deeply unreasonable. Fifteen dollars is fifteen dollars, she said. I don't think it sold. Last I checked the listing still had zero bids and an ending time three days out.
Anyway. If you've still got it on your phone, maybe don't update anything for a while. Not that I'm telling you to try and flip it on eBay, that seems like a lot of effort for a maybe-payout, but there's something a little bit funny about carrying around a tiny piece of a controversy in your pocket, even an incredibly dumb one about a bird.