Angry Birds for Android Steps it up a Notch
By: Hillel Fuld
Angry Birds has turned into one of the biggest success stories of the entire mobile development world. It is in the top apps of the App Store since… forever, it has been downloaded over 2 million times on Android, despite it not even launching in the actual Android Market, just in GetJar, and now the company is getting its feet wet in another industry, toys. There are now Angry Birds plush toys for sale and no, I am not kidding. Each of these cute toys will put you back $14.99, clearly a worthwhile investment in the big scheme of things.
Moving along, the Android version of Angry Birds (say that ten times fast) was just updated and the update pretty much put it on par with the iPhone and iPad versions. The new additions include some bug fixes that were present when playing the game in early versions of Android or on more compact screens. The new Android Angry Birds now supports QVGA graphics as well as a fix for blank screens when playing Angry Birds on Android 1.6, which happens to be the version running on the only Android device I have laying around. Suffice to say, I am a happy camper today, not sure my boss will feel the same way now that I have yet another platform to feed my Angry Bird addiction. That is a topic for another time though.
Angry Birds is going to go down in history as the most sold mobile game ever across platforms. Besides its astounding numbers, users cannot seem to get enough, just check out the comments of yesterday’s post Top 5 Games for iPhone in which the author did not include Angry Birds. Let’s just say he had some Angry Users to deal with.
Angry Birds was recently surpassed and kicked out of its number 1 spot of the most downloaded iPhone game. The new king is Cut the Rope, yet another insanely addictive game, but since Angry Birds is available on Android too (although it is free on Android), I am sure the overall numbers play in favor of the birds.
Rovio, the developers of Angry Birds recently made the news when Chillingo, the publisher of Angry Birds (and coincidently Cut the Rope) was sold to EA. There was a natural amount of confusion among users and on Twitter whether Angry Birds the game, was actually sold or not. Turns out Rovio doesn’t like confusion and clarified (on Twitter, where else would a multi million dollar company make announcements nowadays?) that the rights to Angry Birds belong to them and Chillingo was what was sold, not the birds. Phew.
Anyway, between the widespread addiction, the plush toys, the high level interest in possible acquisitions, and the constant updates and surprises, I think we can all agree that Angry Birds is much more than a mobile app. It has become a true phenomenon! Next up? Political party…
Have you downloaded Angry Birds for Android yet? Would love to hear your feedback in the comments or you know where.
Update: My friend @brianjeremy has brought some crucial information to my attention, there are also Angry Birds cakes, which you can see here.
