Developer Dong Nguyen of dotGears followed through on his warning yesterday and has removed the free game Flappy Bird from the app stores. The tap-to-play release was the No. 1-ranked free title on both iOS and Google Play, but Nguyen said in a tweet on Saturday that “I cannot take this anymore.”
This is an unprecedented move for a No. 1 app. Flappy Bird reportedly had more than 50 million downloads, most of those in the past couple of weeks. Nguyen, a lone developer in Hanoi, Vietnam, made the app. At first, he seemed to enjoy his good fortune and tweeted frequently. But he also got a lot of criticism, in part because the pipes in the game looked a lot like they came from a Nintendo Mario game.

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