It’s been a little under a month since indie game developer Dong Nguyen pulled his wildly popular Flappy Bird from the App Store and Play Store for iOS and Android. Since then, hundreds of Flappy Bird clones emerged ranging from Sesame Street styles to everything in between. At the end of February, clones made up a third of new game uploads.
According to Zedge, a popular personalization app that analyzes data from Google’s Play Store, there are a ton of Flappy Bird clones in existence. Since Feb. 24, Zedge reports at least 864 Flappy Bird clones are present on the Play Store, which is an absolutely staggering number. What’s also interesting is how many of these clones emerged after Nguyen announced his plans to pull Flappy Bird from the various app stores. Since his announcement on February 8, 729 of the 864 clones were launched on the store, 37 on the very day of his announcement! At its peak there were nearly 70 Flappy Bird clones being produced each day.
Surprisingly, people love that we have all these Flappy clones running about. Based on the data provided to DT by Zedge, 210 of the 864 apps discovered have a perfect score of 5. Now, this may be skewed as many of these apps have just one or two ratings (likely from friends or family) but many other Flappy clones have high ratings, too. In fact 504 of the 864 apps have a rating of 4 out of 5 or higher. Dong Nguyen may be gone, but Flappy Bird certainly is not. Apple and Google began rejecting games with “Flappy” in the title and removing them, but it may be too little, too late.
Among this mass of apps are a few with some crazy names we just had to share. We didn’t leave links because we have no idea if these apps are free of malware. You’re welcome to search through the Play Store and hunt them down if you must try them. We should also warn you some of these apps may be NSFW.
- Flappy Pterodactyl: If you’re looking for a blast from the past – and by that we mean 65 million years ago – you should give Flappy Pterodactyl a try. The game looks awful but who doesn’t love flying dinosaurs!
- Flappy Hipster: One we found that’s a little meta would have to be Flappy Hipster, an app that involves you helping an iconic individual learn to fly, as opposed to such a person helping Flappy Bird fly.
- Flappy Potato: Another interesting app we spotted is Flappy Potato, the app that proves just about anything can fly if you truly believe.
- Flappy Turd: Last, but certainly not least, is Flappy Turd. The name of this app says just about all there needs to be said.
Go ahead and find one of these if you must satisfy your Flappy desires, or you can try one of the Flappy Bird clones that are now best-sellers on iTunes. We’re pretty sure it won’t be long until all the hype dies off. You can read all of our oddly extensive Flappy Birds coverage here.
