At the risk of changing the name of our blog to “Flappy Battleground”, we once again turn our attention to the ongoing drama involving the many Flappy Bird clones and the Apple iOS app store. Days after putting the kabosh on the use of “flappy” in the names and meta information of new apps, Apple appears to have reversed course by accepting several new apps with the word “flappy” in the title.

At last count, there are currently 26 apps using “Flappy” in the title, including:

Splashy Fish – The Adventure of a Flappy Tiny Bird Fish

City Bird – Flappy Flyer

Attack of the Shark Flap Evolution – Hungry Dash

Flappy Fly – An Endless Tap Screen Flyer Game – Fly that Swoops and Flys like a Bird

Flappy Devil – The Bird is Back

Flappy Mega Fish: Frozen Baby Bird Fish Adventure

Flappy Pig – Dodge the Bacon!

Flap! Flap! Chicken Wanted to Fly!

Flappy Devil

Among others…

(On a side note, as someone with an SEO background I haven’t seen this much keyword stuffing since 2006!)

On Monday, we posted an interview with Michal Kacmar – the developer of Jumpy Bee, formerly known as Flappy Bee. His app was one of the first Flappy Bird clones to hit the iOS app store and immediately rose up the charts to rank within the Top 5 Free apps. Kacmar told us that Apple sent him an email threatening to remove his app if he did not remove mentions of the word “flappy” from his title, description and keywords. He complied with Apple’s demands by renaming the game to Jumpy Bee.

Kacmar’s app soon dropped out of the top charts. Now that Apple is permitting new apps with the keyword “flappy”, Kacmar isn’t happy, stating: “They forced us to change the name and metadata which cost us 99% of revenue and downloads and now all of the sudden they let everybody else to just use flappy names everywhere.”

I feel that Kacmar’s complaints are legitimate, especially considering the Top 2 results for “Flappy Bird” (Splashy Fish and City Bird) included “Flappy” in the title over the past week while Kacmar was forced to comply or face having his app pulled from the store.

I recently completed and submitted a Flappy-inspired app of my own, but not before I had to change my initial plans to leverage the “flappy” keyword for app store search visibility. The app that I ultimately submitted did not include the keyword at all. (Once the app is approved, I will post a recap on the reskinning process as a culmination of the #OpReskin series of blog posts. Stay tuned!)

So why did Apple change their stance on this issue? Was this the case of a few negligent App Store reviewers who didn’t get the memo, or was the onslaught of “flappy” apps simple too much for them to handle so they decided to wave the white flag in defeat?

Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.