This weekend, Vietnamese developer Dong Nguyen did something that left the mobile development industry scratching its head—he shut down his tremendously popular Flappy Birds app at the height of its success.
Why would a developer take down an app that was earning a reported $50,000 per day? Nguyen offered a partial answer in a series of tweets. “Yes, the #1 makes a lot of visibility, more profits and also getting more haters :-)” he wrote last week. “I can call Flappy Bird is [sic] a success of mine. But it also ruins my simple life. So now I hate it,” he added. “I am sorry Flappy Bird users, 22 hours from now, I will take Flappy Bird down,” he tweeted Sunday. “I cannot take this anymore.”
In other messages, Nguyen suggested that he was having difficulty handling all the requests from media that accompanied his app’s sudden success. He also shot down rumors that his decision was the result of legal trouble.
