Devs launch 95 Flappy Bird-inspired iOS games in 24 hours

The Guardian looked at about 300 iOS games that launched one day this week and found that 95 of them were either clones or "heavily inspired" by Flappy Bird.

The minimalistic mobile sensation launched last September on iOS and this January on Android. By early February, creator Dong Nguyen said that it was earning $50,000 a day in ad revenue. Nguyen pulled the game from the iOS App Store and Google Play in mid-February because of his concern that the it had "become an addictive product."

A combination of its popularity and simple controls — players need only tap screen to bounce the titular bird through gates and keep it from falling to the ground — have led to similar games available in app stores and on the web. Developers also participated in the Flappy Jam earlier this month, in an attempt to figure out what made the game so compelling.

Using information from Appshopper, The Guardian looked at 293 apps released on a single day earlier this week and found 95 Flappy Bird-like apps with names like Flappy Parrot - A Tribute Game, Flappy - UFO and Tappy Bieber.

Reports earlier this month claimed that Apple was rejecting Flappy Bird-like apps and Google was marking them as spam. As of this writing, the top of the top free iPhone apps list in the U.S. includes at least three Flappy Bird-like games: Flappy Wings, Hoppy Frog and Splashy Fish. Google Play's top free Android apps list includes Clumsy Bird and Splashy Fish.