Google and Apple reject all ‘Flappy’ copy apps

17 Feb 2014

Since Flappy Bird’s creator decided to remove his highly addictive app from the Google Play and Apple App Store, dozens of copy apps have been released but now Google and Apple have had enough.

The original app was removed from the online stores a little more than a week ago but in Google Play’s charts, games like Splashy Fish, Flappy Pig, Clumsy Bird and Ironpants litter the rankings in a bid to ride on the coattails of the successful app.

One such game designer was Canadian Ken Carpenter, who when putting in his application for an app called Flappy Dragon into the App Store, was told his “app name attempts to leverage a popular app”.

According to the guidelines that Apple sent Carpenter when rejecting his app, “We found that your app, and/or its metadata, contains content that could be misleading to users, which is not in compliance with the App Store Review Guidelines.”

Carpenter has since been active on Twitter, calling out the companies on why his app was rejected and claiming he has been singled out as an experiment on blocking apps.

“Second time I had to change the name from Flappy Dragon to Derpy Dragon. I am apparently the test case for Google and Apple.”

There hasn’t been any answer on what will happen to games that don’t contain the word ‘flappy’ but copy the gameplay of Flappy Bird, but it’s unlikely that both Google and Apple will be able to filter all of the copied games in Flappy Bird’s wake.

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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