One more thing

‘The Everything-Destroyer’: No, it’s not a B-movie…

Developers complain it’s too hard to get noticed on the App Store, but every so often something surprises us. Take Flappy Bird. It is, at best, an irritating and buggy game that deserved nothing more than to languish in the abyss outside the top 100, yet somehow it became an overnight sensation.

How it became so popular is beyond me (I played it once, and that was enough). Most apps just trundle along on a predictable pattern of initial spike and then long tail into oblivion, but at some point Flappy Bird took off. The sheer weight of its popularity created a peculiar momentum that spun it out of its predictable orbit and sent it racing to the top of the charts, before the developer pulled it from the App Store because “I cannot take this anymore”, in regards to the sudden fame

The sheer weight of its popularity created a peculiar momentum that spun it out of its

predictable orbit

and notoriety the app brought. The next thing you know, every developer is scrambling to fill the void with Flappyclones. Apple, fighting back, rejected most under the rule, ‘We found your app name attempts to leverage a popular app.’ But some slipped the net, and the early bird Flappy Fish is top of the charts as I write.

I like the fact that the App Store can still throw up these success stories that defy explanation. It’s the one area of Apple’s tightly managed, safe, corporate identity that it has little control over, and reminds me of the company’s more colourful past, where the crazy ones ruled, and you were encouraged to think different.

I still can’t stand the game, though.