Frustrated developer removes the No. 1-ranked Flappy Bird from app stores

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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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.