Comment on Is Flappy Bird a good game?

TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

• queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It was extremely popular. For a while after it got pulled there was a small market for phones in airplane mode that still had a working version of the app. Some of the auctions went into the high five figures.

  source

  • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Which I never understood. You just needed the apk. I only heard of the game after it was pulled. I went online, found one of those apk mirror sites, downloaded it, and installed it. Not sure why they put the phones in airplane mode to sell the phones. Then again I always have my phones set to never auto-update.

    source

    • queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      IIRC the reasoning was that if the play store / app store synced, the app would be removed from the phone. I think for the vast majority of people, you may as well ask them to cast a spell as ask them to “sideload an APK”, so if they really really wanted to play Flappy Bird and felt that was beyond their capacity, this was the only alternative. Or maybe people thought phones with the “original” app would appreciate in value as collector’s items? The whole thing is mysterious to me.

      source