With the rise and fall of Flappy Bird has come a lot of interesting news concerning ad revenue, cloned games and such. However, since the developer took the game down – supposedly for our own good – there has been an almighty influx of Flappy Bird clones to hit the Play Store and all over the web. Some of these are quite fun, and the majority of them are all tongue-in-cheek and designed to be a lot of fun. Let’s face it though, nobody sets out to create a Flappy Bird clone to create something amazing, it’s merely a way of cashing in on the keyword and getting some ad revenue or attention for another game you might already have on sale. This is a little ironic, considering that Flappy Bird itself wasn’t a completely original title, however it looks as if Google and Apple have had enough of it. As many developers are reporting, apps and games with “Flappy” in the title are being rejected from the Play Store.
As TechCrunch is reporting, a number of game developers have taken to Twitter to express their distaste with Google’s new stance. Their reasons for rejecting these new apps with Flappy in the title is that these apps and games are constituted as “Spam”. Or at least, that’s what Ken Carpenter of Mind Juice Media found out when his Flappy Dragon game was taken down from the Play Store just 24 hours after launching. Other developers have expressed similar experiences and noted that renaming the game gets around Google’s new issue however, it seems that Google has only just started such a move. A quick Google Play search for the word “Flappy” gets you the following results:
So yeah, that’s a lot of Flappy clones right there. With three of them being called “Flappy Fish”, two being pleasantly named “Flappy Turd” and two “Flappy Bee” games. It seems strange to us that Google would stop one app entering the store but then allow all the others to remain. The whole idea of “Everyone else has had their fun, you’re too late” isn’t a fair way to treat developers. Without doubt, these clones have gone too far and I can’t help but think about the influx of Pong games that flooded the market that led to the video games crash of 1983. We doubt that this is the last we’ve heard of flappy anything, but hopefully Google adjusts their policy accordingly. Double-standards aren’t cool, and to say one app is Flappy Spam when there are three (or more) Flappy Fish games in the Play Store is a little hypocritical.