So this has been a weird week to be paying attention to phones. Facebook bought WhatsApp on Wednesday for something like $19 billion, which is such an absurd number that I actually said "no way" out loud at my desk, alone, like an idiot. Nineteen billion dollars for an app that mostly replaces text messages. I dont even have a strong take on it yet, my brain hasnt processed the zeroes. But thats not actually what I want to write about tonight.
What I want to write about is Flappy Bird, because I think it's the funnier story and nobody's really talking about the funny part anymore.
Quick recap for anyone who was living under a rock: some guy in Vietnam, Dong Nguyen, made this incredibly janky, incredibly hard side-scrolling bird game, it blew up out of nowhere in January, and then a couple weeks ago he just... pulled it. Took it down from the App Store entirely, said the attention was ruining his life, said people were messaging him at all hours. Fair enough, honestly. I don't think anyone owes the internet a game.
But heres the part that's been eating my brain since it happened. The second the game vanished from the store, phones that already had it installed became, briefly, actual collectors items. People started listing their iPhones on eBay with Flappy Bird still sitting there in the app grid like it was a rare baseball card. I got sucked into refreshing eBay searches for an embarrassing amount of time one night last week instead of doing literally anything productive. There was a beat-up iPhone 4 with a cracked corner, starting bid $650, and by the time I checked back it had something like sixty-some bids on it. Sixty bids. For a phone whose only special quality is a mediocre app that still, technically, exists on about four hundred million other devices that had it downloaded before the cutoff.
I did not bid. I want to be very clear about that, mostly because my partner would have had questions. But I understand the impulse in a weird way, and thats the part I keep turning over. Its not really about the game. Nobody actually thinks Flappy Bird is good — its two rectangles and a pipe, the physics are stiff, the whole thing is basically a rage machine designed to make you throw your phone at a wall. What people wanted was the scarcity. One week it's the most downloaded free app on earth, completely disposable, and the next week its gone and suddenly everyone's acting like it's a Renoir.
And of course, because nothing stays gone on the internet for more than about six hours, the App Store immediately filled back up with clones. Flappy this, Flappy that, birds and bees and planes all doing the exact same stiff-winged nonsense, riding the wave while the original guy presumably sits somewhere not checking Twitter. I tried two of the clones out of morbid curiosity and deleted both within about four minutes combined. They're not even lazy copies, theyre aggressively lazy copies, like whoever built them didnt even bother changing the pipe color.
Heres my actual opinion, since Im supposed to have one: pulling a wildly popular free game because it's stressing you out is a completely reasonable, almost admirable thing to do, and the market's response to that (turn it into a weird collectible, then immediately strip-mine the idea with clones) says way more about us than it does about the guy who made it. We cant just let a thing end. Somebody made a decision to stop, and within about seventy-two hours the internet had built an entire miniature economy around ignoring that decision.
Compare that to the WhatsApp thing, actually, now that I'm typing it out — nineteen billion dollars changes hands and everyone mostly shrugs and goes back to texting their group chat, but one guy takes down a free bird game and eBay turns into a circus. I dont know what that says exactly. Probably nothing. Its late and I have work in six hours and I should not be writing conclusions about internet psychology at this point in the evening.
Anyway. If anyone actually won one of those Flappy Bird phone auctions, email me, I have questions.