So Flappy Bird has been gone from the App Store for ten days now and honestly the whole thing has gotten weirder than the game ever was. Dong Nguyen pulled it on February 10th, said something about it being "an addictive product" he felt guilty about, and just deleted it. No warning to anyone who'd built ad networks around it, no heads up to the App Store editorial team, nothing. One day it's the number one free app on the planet, the next day it's gone and your phone is basically a museum piece if you happened to have it installed.
And that's the part nobody saw coming. People are now selling their phones. Not the phones themselves for phone reasons, just because Flappy Bird is still sitting on them. I spent twenty minutes on eBay last night (don't judge me, I was procrastinating on actual work) and there were dozens of listings, iPhones and old iPods with screenshots of the app still open, asking anywhere from a couple hundred bucks up into four figures. Whether anyone is actually paying that is a different question, but the listings are real and there are a lot of them.
Meanwhile the App Store itself has turned into a landfill. Search "flappy" right now and you get probably thirty apps that are just green pipes and a bird sprite with the serial numbers filed off. Flappy Wings, Splashy Fish, Ironpants Adventure, a bunch more I can't even remember the names of because they all blur together. Some of these were clearly built and submitted within like 48 hours of the original getting pulled, which tells you everything about how low the bar is for cloning a game that's mechanically just tap to flap, don't hit the pipe. Apple has been yanking some of them for using the word flappy in the name, which is a little funny because Apple didn't seem to care when the original was making an estimated fifty grand a day in ad revenue and everyone was writing about it like it was a miracle of App Store meritocracy.
Here's my actual opinion on this, since I know a couple people are going to email me disagreeing: the game was never that good. It was hard in the annoying way, not the satisfying way, where you die because the hitbox on the pipes is stingier than it looks rather than because you made a mistake you could learn from. I played it for maybe four days total before I got bored and deleted it myself, well before Nguyen did it for everyone else. The whole cultural moment around it says a lot more about how starved people are for something simple to do in a waiting room than it does about the game's design.
There's a bigger story swirling around too, the Comcast and Time Warner Cable merger news from last week, forty five billion dollars on the table, and I keep meaning to write something longer about what that could mean for anyone who's ever had to sit on hold with Comcast support (three hours, once, I am still bitter about it). But that one's going to take actual research and this week has just been Flappy Bird nonsense clogging up my Twitter feed instead.
There's also the small matter of a company everyone is calling worth nineteen billion dollars now, but honestly if I have to read one more post explaining why that number makes sense I'm going to close the tab. Every tech blog on the internet has that one covered already this week. I'm more interested in the dumb stuff happening on the edges of it, like people arguing in app store reviews about whether a bird clone counts as art.
Anyway if you've still got the real Flappy Bird on your phone, back it up somehow before you update anything. Screenshot the icon if nothing else. In a year people are going to be nostalgic about this in a way that feels completely unearned, and you might as well have proof you were there.