In-App Review Mechanics pushed Flappy Bird to the Top of the Charts? | Hacker News Reader

In-App Review Mechanics pushed Flappy Bird to the Top of the Charts?

venturebeat.com

43 pointsmartinshen27 comments

Most of the articles about Flappy Bird are frustrating. Everybody assumes that the developer somehow "hacked" the system, refusing to believe a phenomenon where sometimes just everything aligns and makes you successful.

What I find even pathetic is that people trying to explain how Flappy Bird hacked it's way by the means available to everybody - like botnets posting reviews.

I think in the reality it's just this: Sometimes people or products happen to be at the right time at the right place.

Think about celebrities. Are the most popular actors that much outstanding from many others? Or musicians? Or artists? Most of them just happen to be caught to the perfect storm and they shine. Think about an actor who was in few movies before, but this time he is the Top Gun - and now we have Tom Cruise. What He did in Top Gun that he didn't in Risky Business?

We like to believe that we live in a meritocratic society but most of the time glamour is about luck. I am not even sure that there is anyone or any product that is so outstanding that millions of people celebrate it for it's meritocratic qualities.

That's why sometimes an old song becomes a hit many years later, like the song Beggin' became popular again 40 years after it's first debut. Did Madcon somehow made an outstanding cover for first time in 40 years?

Sometimes it becomes a meme, like Three Wolf Moon becoming one after a review on amazon. Was this review first of it's kind or something really that outstanding? I don't think so.

Flappy Bird was caught by the perfect storm, that's it. The game had the qualities, just like many other games, and some chaotic chain of events placed the game to a position where it can run for the glamour.

Outliers is a fun book about this type of stuff. It's not that the creator "hacked" the system for Flappy Bird -- all signs point to him being a super authentic game designer who just made his game, and for lack of a better word "lucked" into all the right circumstances. However, it's still interesting to try to determine which factors played a role in something that clearly had such a non-standard trajectory. Everything that goes "viral" has to have some catalyst that created the opportunity to go viral. Nobody knew about Flappy Bird in May, hence it could not go viral. Something changed in December and that is what is so fascinating.

You are right. We are naturally pattern seeking and everyone is trying to explain this complex phenomenon with causality. Is highly improbable that someone will know the real cause (probably is multi-causal), and more important, knowing it does not guarantee that it will work again. What you can do is ride the wave, looks like we have a new flappy in town: http://www.topappcharts.com/568868771/app-details-adventures.... Currently at #5, now is time to start explaining how they got there, too :)

This is not actually true -- I ran some analysis on review data and when controlling for downloads there isn't a strong correlation between ranking and # of reviews.

For example, https://sensortower.com/ios/us/funzio-inc/app/modern-war/468... Modern War had a spike on Feb 9th -- ranking stayed as predicted.

Another example: Facebook https://sensortower.com/ios/us/facebook-inc/app/facebook/284... on Jan 23 or Smule Dec 5th: https://sensortower.com/ios/us/smule/app/magic-piano-by-smul...

A lot of apps can push user messages say via urban airship to prompt for reviews, and we see events like this all the time.

Interesting, do you have data on Flappy Bird itself? Apple might normalize their data for those kinds of anomalies like Modern War's blip, but your Magic Piano example does show a rise in ranking both of the times they had an upswing in reviews.

Apple does seem to weight installs over time, so I wouldn't be surprised if they also weight reviews over time to catch those kinds of push notification strategies. Zach Williams's data showed something quite different than Modern War's: more of a snowballing after the initial climb, so maybe the consistent influx of reviews from the in-game button was a "normal" enough data point to get past Apple. Nobody obviously knows for sure all of the details of Apple's current algorithm.

Also not true: Apple doesn't get "Engagement" data from the app, so that part of the ranking formula is wrong.

Thanks, this is good to know.

The other large component which gets thrown around is engagement. It seems as if only companies like flurry would be able to discern this sort of information. Anything on a large scale with an embedded sdk that reports engagement really.

> no evidence that any money was spent on traditional user acquisition

I love this. In my eternal naivety, I would have assumed 'traditional' user acquisition would refer to organic growth, not the $80K user review services referenced in the article.

While this technical analysis is interesting, I'm not convinced it is a significant reason behind Flappy Bird's success. I don't think any other game has created as much of a buzz. When you have your friends telling you to download it, when you see school kids on the train competing with their high scores, when it is featured in every newspaper you pick up, it is no wonder the game was successful. The Apple Store formula doesn't even come into the calculation when you have word-of-mouth. Perhaps it was just a good game that people enjoyed.

But what was the tipping point? The game was out for 6 months where it got next to no traction.

For indie games, usually any growth only comes after some celebrity or big media outlet mentions it (e.g. Angry Birds took off after some Olympic skier mentioned playing it). There didn't seem to be any such moment with Flappy Bird.

The biggest YouTuber in the world made a video about it - that was most likely the Tipping Point. Now the real question is what was the path it took to get to a PewDiePie video.

PewDiePie posted the video to his YouTube channel on January 27th, but Flappy Bird was already #1 as of January 17th. By the time it went viral with all this word of mouth and news coverage it was already #1. So the most fascinating part (especially on the App Store where a sudden rise like this is so anomalous) is how it took off to the #1 spot in the first place when it had been on the store since May. It might have needed to have all the other ingredients (addictive gameplay, nostalgic art, etc.) to do what it did, but those aren't what triggered it shooting from zero to #1 in a couple weeks.

> Perhaps it was just a good game that people enjoyed.

Really? Yeah, I get that it not being a microtransaction-pile-of-garbage probably helped, but did you play it? Seriously, nobody at the beginning could have thought it was good. After the buzz, quality isn't relevant.

The problem is the ranking algorithms. At least on iOS, the relative ranking list doesn't go below 300, so if you're below that, you're invisible. But, if you crack that, you're off to the races (that's how I stumbled on it).

The bigger problem is that rankings don't decay. Candy Crush should be continually falling in the rankings if it isn't growing in order to make way for something new that is.

However, that isn't what Apple wants. Apple wants things that PAY. So, they want their ranking algorithms to keep the things that gross the most money as high as possible as long as possible. So, Apple isn't even remotely interested in "fixing" the problem.

And we come back to, "The walled garden sucks for the consumers."

> Really? Yeah, I get that it not being a microtransaction-pile-of-garbage probably helped, but did you play it? Seriously, nobody at the beginning could have thought it was good. After the buzz, quality isn't relevant.

I learned about it through a girl I'm currently seeing. She is very far removed from the whole tech scene. Her cousin told her to try it, and then she told me to try it and impress her by getting a high score. So I tried it, enjoyed it (masochism involved here), and the very next day my roommate asked me if I knew of the game. We've been competing with each other for high scores ever since.

So yes, at the beginning I thought it was good.

Rankings do decay. Top Grossing rankings are consistent because the top apps have a large user base, from which a small fraction will purchase the iAPs. Those apps do make the most amount of money in the days before.

Free/Paid charts change all the time -- the apps that show up there get the most amount of downloads.

I cannot believe how incredibly butthurt some people are over the huge success of Flappy Bird. They can't accept that the game was a success virally. In fact, the success of this game embodies the nature of "viral" perfectly.

I find it hilarious that bloggers are coming out and talking fake-authoritatively over how Flappy Bird somehow beat the system through some stupid hacks.

It's really as simple as that fact that the game is both simple and hard at the same time. It's simple enough so that people think "I can do better" but it's very hard to. The fact that it is so tantalizingly simple is what makes it addictive. It's not because he paid for user reviews or anything else like that.

Case in point is that his ball juggling game is very hard, but when I play it, I don't feel like I can do any better because it's too hard. So I've given up on playing it. That's not the same case as flappy bird.

I'd bet it was a combination of the "Bird" hitting Angry Birds searches and icon suggesting it was an angry birds game, mario themed art enticing nintendo fans. You often see scam apps employ similar strategies(similar name and icon to popular app, misleading screenshots). The fact that it wasn't a scam, but a playable and potentially interesting game(if you've never played it's predecessors) helped, reviews helped, and the overexcited media eager to report on the next app fad sealed the deal.

So a Mario themed Flappy Candy Bird Saga should be gold, right?

Is it a fact that the rating button was previously located where the Play button is? Or is this speculation? Has someone seen this supposed old version of the app?

It seems to me that a user tricked into going to the App Store is likely to leave a bad review.

Old version: http://imgur.com/CSFw8Yv.png

I'm sorry, but there are a lot of games that employ dark patterns. And there are a lot of games that frequently prompt players to rate their app. It's pretty implausible that this is a primary reason that Flappy Bird reached (and maintained) #1 for so long. If for no other reason that if a dark pattern like this were as effective as the author claims, that it wouldn't drive constant 5-star reviews.

sigh Correlation does not imply causation. More than likely, the spike in downloads was because it was linked to large parts of the internet via Facebook, Youtube and news sites. This drove most of the reviews. Sure, the 5 star rating helped, but plenty of other apps with low downloads also have 5 stars.

5 star ratings and 1000 or so downloads are the barrier an app needs to cross before people even look at it, sure, but it's what half the free apps on the app stores have anyway. It's certainly not some criteria for success, only a criteria to get noticed at all to begin with.

So the paid reviews would have pushed Flappy Bird to appear near the top of searching for 'Flappy Bird' or 'Flappy' (as most apps ends up after a few months if they don't just crash), but the actual game itself and what it inspired in social and traditional media is what pushed it to the top of the charts.

This just sounds like they're trying to jump on the Flappy Bird hype bandwagon some more. I doubt most people would continue to submit a review after accidentally reaching the page from a "dark pattern".

The reviews are posted because people like trying to be funny and have enjoyed some of the other reviews (read some of them!).

For what it's worth, I have released about 50 apps into the App Store and observed how difficult it is to get organic downloads every time. But, 1 of my 50 apps (Bloody Knuckles) for whatever reason absolutely blew up - it got 10K downloads the first day and rose to #2 overall in about 4 days with absolutely no promotion of any kind. Based on my experience, I definitely know that it's possible to have a right place/right time/right game/right app name/icon etc. experience like that and I don't think Flappy Bird's creator did anything to hack the system. Just my $0.02.

If someone was using a dark pattern and interrupted my game play to take me to the App Store, you'd better bet I wouldn't rate it 5 stars, so I'm not sure about this theory.

Does anyone know of an up-to-date analysis of the iOS app store ranking algorithm? I've seen first hand how ratings can move an app up the list, but I've never noticed engagement or sales having an impact.

Apple keeps it very close to the chest, a lot like Google does with their algorithms. If people know what makes rankings rise and fall, they'll inevitably find a way to game the system. The only things I've seen that definitively affect rankings is downloads and ratings. Sales affect the top grossing rankings only.

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