Remember Flappy Bird, the insanely-addictive iPhone game which spawned a million clones, despite being pulled from the App Store by its creator? Well, it’s back — as a native app for the Apple Watch.
Created by U.K. developer Hamza Sood, the Apple Watch app was created following the release of watchOS 2 at WWDC, giving the opportunity for developers to create native apps for Apple’s wearable device as opposed to the iPhone extensions that are currently doing the rounds.
Check out a video below.
Hacked a Flappy Bird clone onto Apple Watch with native SpriteKit rendering, touch/crown control, SFX through speaker pic.twitter.com/U1cavXb7SN
— Hamza Sood (@hamzasood) June 16, 2015
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a non-iPhone Apple device run Flappy Bird. Last year, programmer Dagen Brock created a version which could run at 60 FPS on his vintage 1MHz Apple IIe without flicker.
Due to the Apple Watch’s tiny screen, this latest version might be a bit less easy to play, but that doesn’t make it any less of an impressive feat — not least because Hamza Sood managed to utilize both the touchscreen and digital crown to control the bird’s flight.
Source: Redmond Pie
Luke Dormehl is a U.K.-based journalist and author, with a background working in documentary film for Channel 4 and the BBC. He is the author of The Apple Revolution and The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems … and Create More, both published by Penguin/Random House. His tech writing has also appeared in Wired, Fast Company, Techmeme and other publications.
3 responses to “Hacked Apple Watch runs Flappy Bird as native app”
Why would you want to try to play a game like that on such a tiny screen?
It’s more a matter of feature achievement on the programming side, than playability feasibility.
Playing this would result in tears for me, playing this horribly addictive game on my 6 plus winds me up………Imagine playing on a watch ?