South African owners of Apple phones and tablets with gaming app hit Flappy Bird installed on them are turning to a local classifieds website to try sell the gadgets at double their market value.
The Vietnamese developer of Flappy Bird, who goes by the name ‘Dong Nguyen’ on Twitter, dramatically pulled his application from Google and Apple app stores on Sunday after the game notched up millions of downloads.
Nguyen also claimed that Flappy Bird was making $50,000 per day in advertising revenue.
His reasoning for discontinuing the game is unclear. Speculators have said that Flappy Bird may have infringed upon copyright as it closely resembled the likes of Nintendo’s Mario Bros.
Nintendo; though, has denied issuing warnings to Nguyen, while the Flappy Bird developer himself has tweeted that he did not pull the game because of legal reasons.
Nevertheless, owners of smart devices with the Flappy Bird app installed have been turning to e-commerce websites to try and make quick money out of the craze.
On US website eBay, second-hand smart devices with the app have started selling for up to $100,000.
And this trend has caught on in South Africa as well: albeit in a more tame way.
An Apple iPad 2 and iPhone 5, both with Flappy Bird installed on them, are being sold on local classifieds website Gumtree.co.za for respectively R10,000 and R15,000 each: almost double their market value.
On Gumtree, other iPad 2 devices with Wi-Fi and 3G are selling at just R4,000. Meanwhile, the latest generation iPad Air retails at R9,999 for the 64GB model with Wi-Fi and 3G.
Also, a second-hand iPhone 5S, which is not advertising a Flappy Bird install on Gumtree.co.za, is selling for R 8,799.
Methods do exist for owners of Android smart devices to download the game even though it is not officially available on the Google Play Store anymore. This is because the Android version of the game and its files have been cloned owing to the Android operating system’s more open nature.
However, Apple fans cannot resort to the same methods, opening the way for potentially lucrative short-term firesales of second-hand iPhone and iPad devices.
“When it comes to iOS, the only source to get anything on your phone is directly from the Apple store,” South African technology entrepreneur, IT consultant and blogger Liron Segev told ITWeb Africa.
Segev said Apple device owners who do not have the game could install Flappy Bird illegally by ‘jailbreaking’ their phones, but even this method could be tricky. And Segev notes that jailbreaking, which involves having more access to the iOS operating system, may not be able to help successfully install the Flappy Bird app either.
“There’s lots of cracks around but there’s nothing that a layman can do easily,” Segev said.
Segev added; though, that there is no risk associated with buying a second-hand Apple device installed with Flappy Bird.
“Is there a danger? I don’t think so. The reason I don’t think so is because I can’t go and create a Flappy Bird application that will go ahead and steal your data as all apps in the iTunes stores are heavily scrutinised to ensure that they don’t do anything dodgy like stealing the data. Unlike Android where you can install from third party sites and there is very little control of what you are getting when not using the official store,” Segev said.
Meanwhile, the developer of Flappy Bird has been silent since pulling down his game.
He last tweeted on 8 February.
“I can call 'Flappy Bird' is a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it,” Nguyen said on Twitter last week.
(Image source: http://www.gumtree.co.za)
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