‘Flappy Bird’ will fly back to app stores

Let the flapless among us take heart. “Flappy Bird,” the now defunct mobile sensation, will one day rise like a phoenix and fling itself awkwardly into an app store near you.

Dong Nguyen, the creator of the infuriatingly addictive and deceptively difficult mobile game confirmed as much early Wednesday on Twitter. Responding to a tweet Dong sent last month, a follower directly asked if he plans to ever make the game available again.

“Yes,” Nguyen replied. “But not soon.”

That’s an about-face from last month, when Nguyen, in a rare interview, told Forbes that “Flappy Bird” was “gone forever.”

Originally released last May, “Flappy Bird” had largely languished before a surge in popularity, starting around December, that would see it become the most downloaded app in both Apple’s App Store and the Google Play store for Android devices.

At the time of its demise, “Flappy Bird” had an average four-star rating from more than 543,000 reviews in the Apple App Store and 228,000 on Android. Many of the reviews were lengthy, tongue-in-cheek tales of time lost, marriages ended and people going cuckoo after playing the game.

At the time, Nguyen said he was afraid that what he’d intended to be a simple pastime had gotten out of control and become “addictive” to some users. The Vietnamese developer, who has stayed largely out of the spotlight, had also come under intense scrutiny, with some accusing him (without evidence, it should be noted) of using bots to artificially inflate the game’s app-store rankings.

People who had already downloaded the app didn’t lose it, but those who hadn’t were out of luck.

And so, we wait. In the mean time, Dot Gears, Nguyen’s studio, has two other games available for download – “Shuriken Block” and “Super Ball Juggling.” And he promises more to come – probably before we see “Flappy Bird” again.

Or you could just busy yourself with one of the multitude of “Flappy Bird” clones, which continue to flood app stores at insane rates.