Epic Games Store has brought Flappy Bird, the viral game where you tap repeatedly tap the screen to guide the bird as far as you can without hitting pipes and other obstacles, back to Android devices over a decade after it disappeared.
According to a report from Polygon, Flappy Bird Publishing relaunched Flappy Bird as an Android-exclusive game with help from Epic Games after game developer Dong Nguyen pulled it from Apple’s App Store and Google Play Store in 2014. Last year, Nguyen said he was not involved in the game’s revival nor is he making any profit from it.
Flappy Bird Publishing said in a news release published on Tuesday that Flappy Bird will be updated “with worlds, characters, and themes throughout 2025.” They also said that the game will be monetized “solely by ads and in-game purchases,” specifically helmets. You can check out the trailer for the Android-exclusive revival of the classic ornithological wonder.
Bringing Flappy Bird back to life was not without its challenges — and some of those challenges were riddled with controversy. Flappy Bird Foundation attempted to re-release the game through the popular messaging app Telegram last September, but it removed that detail from its Linktree page. Then came the article by cryptocurrency researcher Varun Biniwale, who wrote that Flappy Bird was being remade with web3 and NFT elements by a crypto company called 1208 Productions, which owns the NFT brand Deez. Meanwhile, clones of the game have been cropping up in the decade since it got delisted.
Three days later, Nguyen shared a post on X (formerly Twitter) denouncing the game’s remake because of its ties to crypto, which he wrote that he doesn’t support. He also pointed out that he didn’t sell Flappy Bird nor its trademark to Flappy Bird Foundation; the group bought it themselves.
Now that Flappy Bird is back on the market, players can enjoy the one of the most popular games of the 2010s next to Angry Birds in a brand new way.
Two new highly requested iCloud plugins just got added to ChatGPT, giving people who rely on Apple’s Mail and Calendar services a way to search emails, check appointments, and manage their schedules directly through the chatbot.
The integration is rolling out to all ChatGPT plans, including the free tier. You can access it on the web, desktop, and iOS.
Google Play is borrowing one of the Nintendo Switch’s most useful little tricks. A new Sidekick tool called Playbacks captures a short clip after something interesting has already happened, sparing players from running a screen recorder throughout an entire game.
Playbacks is part of Google Play Store v53.8 and keeps saved clips on the phone. Google first announced it earlier this month, but the new Play Store update marks its arrival for players. Anyone who has watched a perfect win vanish because the record button came too late already understands the appeal.
Samsung’s scandal over its Game Optimizing Service, or GOS, has returned with a bill attached. South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has tentatively fined the company 20.1 billion won, or about $15.1 million, over gaming claims made for the Galaxy S21, Galaxy S22, and Tab S8.
The regulator says Samsung promoted the devices as gaming powerhouses without disclosing that GOS placed preset CPU and GPU limits on certain demanding games. Samsung disputes that conclusion, calling GOS a legitimate way to manage heat.