Flappy Bird is Now in Amazon's App Store, But Will it Ever Really Return?

Amazon's Android-based app store has been criticized in the past for, well, not having enough apps--especially Google's native apps (Gmail, Google Drive, etc.). And while their app store does severely lag behind the competition, it may have just landed the killer app of killer apps. It has just been announced that Flappy Bird, one of the most popular and notorious mobile games ever, is now in the Amazon app store, of all places.

The Verge is reporting that after months of remaining out of the limelight, Dong Nguyen, Flappy Bird's creator, has created a new version of the game called Flappy Birds Family. But, like we said, the game is currently only available in Amazon's app store, but there's another restriction: you can only play the game on Amazon's Fire TV set-top box. So that means if you have Kindle Fire tablet or Amazon's Fire Phone, you still won't be able to play game on a mobile device.

Apparently Flappy Birds Family is a lot like its predecessor, with the main differences being that it supports local multiplayer action, and also has some updates to the obstacles you fly through. 

OTHER PLATFORMS?

Nguyen stated back in May that Flappy Bird would return to app stores, but, very cleverly, he didn't really say which app store. And he certainly didn't mention anything about Amazon's of all places. 

Nguyen pulled the game from app stores earlier this year when its meteoric rise caught him off guard and led him to feel guilty because of the games' reportedly highly addictive nature. Since the game can currently only be played in homes, perhaps this was Nguyen's solution to the problem of people playing too much.

Given how much time people are increasingly spending on mobile devices (or the amount of time people refuse to spend doing things other than be on their mobile devices), if his play was truly to limit how much time people spend playing his games (an almost incomprehensible scenario for a game developer today), then the move to Amazon's TV platform was a truly brilliant move. 

Only time will tell if the game will return to other platforms, but in the meantime, it appears that Nguyen and Amazon both got what they wanted.