So it's been about two and a half weeks since Dong Nguyen pulled Flappy Bird off the App Store and Google Play, and instead of the whole thing quietly dying like every other app fad, it's somehow gotten weirder. People are selling their old phones on eBay specifically because Flappy Bird is still installed on them.
I'm not making this up. I've spent an embarrassing amount of time the last few nights scrolling eBay listings where the entire pitch is "iPhone 4, cracked corner, has Flappy Bird, screen's hard to unlock so the app can't be deleted." Some of these were asking three figures for a phone that would otherwise sell for maybe forty bucks on Craigslist. I saw one listing claiming a bid past ten thousand dollars, which, come on. Nobody's paying five figures for a game where a bird bonks into a pipe. eBay apparently agreed, because they went and banned the whole practice a couple weeks back, official reasoning being you can't sell a phone as a vehicle for someone else's copyrighted software. Which is a very reasonable rule that absolutely nobody selling these phones cared about until eBay started yanking the listings.
Here's the thing that gets me though. The game itself isn't good. I mean that as a compliment and an insult at the same time. I've played worse games. I've also thrown my phone onto a couch cushion out of pure rage after hitting the second pipe for the eleventh straight time, so clearly it was doing something right. But the actual mechanical loop is about as simple as anything I've touched since the Nokia snake game, and I say that as someone who owned a 3310. Tap to flap, don't hit the pipe, that's the whole design document. Nguyen reportedly built the thing in a couple of days in his spare time and was pulling something like fifty grand a day in ad revenue once it took off, which, if that number's even close to right, is enough to make every ad agency on earth a little uncomfortable.
And then he just deleted it, saying in a couple tweets that it had become an addiction he didn't want to be responsible for anymore. Instead of that being the end of it, the internet decided the smart move was to hoard the last copies like it was toilet paper before a storm. I get the impulse a little, honestly. There's something about a thing being gone forever that makes people want it more than they ever wanted it while it was everywhere. Nobody was posting "I love Flappy Bird" back in January the way people started the second it went away.
What I keep coming back to is how fast the whole cycle happened. A guy in Hanoi makes a free game in his bedroom, it sits ignored for months, then it rockets to the top of both app store charts at once sometime in January, then three weeks later he's deleting it because the attention got to be too much, and now grown adults are auctioning off phones like they're selling a signed baseball. That's maybe six weeks total from nothing to gone to collector's item. I don't think any other medium moves that fast. A book doesn't get pulled from shelves and turn into a black market item in the same month it hit the bestseller list.
For what it's worth, I've still got it on my own phone. Haven't opened it in probably ten days because I got tired of losing to a bird made out of what looks like four pixels, but I haven't deleted it either. Partly laziness, partly some weird obligation to hang onto it now that it's gone, like I'm keeping a piece of something even though the something is three columns of green pipes and one very angry bird. I won't be listing the phone on eBay though. It's got a cracked screen and a battery that dies by 2pm most days, and even in this market I doubt that's worth three hundred dollars to anybody, Flappy Bird or not.
If your uncle emails you asking whether he should sell his old iPhone because the game's still on it, the honest answer right now is probably not, since eBay's pulling those listings almost as fast as they go up. Tell him to just keep playing it badly like the rest of us.