

In-App Review Mechanics pushed Flappy Bird to the Top of the Charts? - martinshen
http://venturebeat.com/2014/02/11/how-in-app-review-mechanics-pushed-flappy-bird-to-the-top-of-the-charts/

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mrtksn
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.

~~~
michaelone
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.

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diziet
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...](https://sensortower.com/ios/us/funzio-inc/app/modern-
war/468327549) 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...](https://sensortower.com/ios/us/facebook-
inc/app/facebook/284882215) on Jan 23 or Smule Dec 5th:
[https://sensortower.com/ios/us/smule/app/magic-piano-by-
smul...](https://sensortower.com/ios/us/smule/app/magic-piano-by-
smule/421254504)

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.

~~~
michaelone
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.

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rch
> 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.

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bbosh
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.

~~~
bsder
> 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."

~~~
neoveller
> 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.

------
steven2012
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.

------
soup10
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.

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

------
guelo
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.

~~~
pkamb
Old version: [http://imgur.com/CSFw8Yv.png](http://imgur.com/CSFw8Yv.png)

------
kosei
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.

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RyanZAG
_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.

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personjerry
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!).

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aaronwgeorge
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.

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ry0ohki
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.

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muzzamike
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.

~~~
SurfScore
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.

