It’s day 4 of Gizmodo’s March Madness bracket challenge to name the greatest app of all time! Yesterday’s match-up was the biggest blowout we’ve seen yet with Google Maps taking 96 percent of the vote and eliminating Yelp from the tournament. Today, we have another David vs Goliath fight as Apple’s iMessage takes on the legendary indie game Flappy Bird.
If you’re just tuning in, you can read all about our selection criteria for this historic contest right here. And as always, if you think we missed your personal favorite app of all time, yell at us in the comments. Now, let’s get into today’s contestants.
With over a billion users, our first contestant is the envy of Android users everywhere and a thorn in Google’s side. Since its launch in 2011, iMessage has never really been considered the most advanced or most secure messaging platform but it’s to the point and the one that’s on every iPhone. Perhaps most importantly, it weeds out non-users by displaying them as green bubbles. This has become a ridiculous status symbol for petty snobs and seemingly every few months Google tries a new tactic to get Apple to open up iMessage or play nice.
But just because it’s become a status symbol doesn’t mean iMessage is a bad messenger. It has plenty of features like memoji, location sharing, reactions, apps, and stickers. But more importantly, Apple recently deployed a new ‘post-quantum encryption protocol’ that’s designed to be future-proof for the coming days when quantum computing can crack today’s standards. At the time of release, cryptography experts called it “overkill” in a good way.
Taking on iMessage, we have one of the only games on our bracket. While some people will reasonably argue that a certain game with birds that are angry would be a better fit for this list, Flappy Bird was a unique and influential phenomenon. Well, unique might be the wrong word since its visual design was so clearly ripped right out of Super Mario Bros. But its incredibly difficult tap-tap-tap gameplay was fresh and addictive. It was so addictive that its developer Dong Nguyen felt guilty and pulled it from app stores.
Seeing an opportunity, a flood of developers seized the chance to get their foot in the door in app store ranking and unleashed countless clones. The gold rush was similar to all the copycats that followed the release of Wordle.
Perhaps feeling a little regret over his initial regret, Nguyen eventually released a new version of the game called Flappy Birds Family as an exclusive on the Amazon App Store.
Today, people still pay a premium on eBay to buy old phones with the original Flappy Bird installed. And developers are much more aware of the kind of impact a simple idea executed by one person can have.
So, reader, what’ll it be? Should the toxic blue bubbles advance to the next round or should the game that doesn’t exist soar ahead?
The Greatest App of All Time: March Madness Bracket Day 1
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