Games copying Flappy Bird threatened to be blocked from stores A screenshot from the game Games with “flappy” in the title have been blocked from Apple’s iOS and Google’s Play stores, and the developers of such games were asked to rename them. Although there has been no official confirmation from Google or Apple, some developers told newswire TechCrunch that their apps were blocked due to their “attempts to leverage a popular app.” These apps must be renamed given the fact that there is a huge number of “flappy” games already available on iTunes and Google Play, newswire Digital Trends reported. “From data gathered by MobileDevHQ, it seems that movement in the iOS App Store charts has ground to a halt, suggesting that Apple is now taking steps to limit the impact of Flappy Bird clones on the market as a whole,” Digital Trends reported. Currently, you can easily find copies of Flappy Bird on almost all mobile operating systems, including a web-based version, most of which are simply identical clones of the original game created by Nguyen Ha Dong. In an interview with Forbes last Tuesday, Dong, the 29-year-old developer of the game, said he removed it because so many gamers became addicted to it. Dong is the developer of many other games, including Super Ball Juggling and Shuriken Block, which are currently standing at No.6 and No.18 in the iOS store, respectively, but Nguyen told Forbes that he has no plans to remove those games as they are harmless. “If he thought users were getting addicted, however, he said he would not hesitate to also "take them down,” Forbes reported. Dong hinted his intentions many days before he removed Flappy Bird when he tweeted that many were overusing the game. In reply to a gamer nicknamed Milicient who said the game “ruined my life,” and his eyes were “bleeding” as he had played the game “8 hours straight,” Dong, nicknamed Dongatory, told Milicient to “take care of yourself first,” as he doesn’t “make games to ruin people’s lives.” On February 8, he tweeted that he removed the game not because he hated the success of it, but “because how people use my game. They are overusing it.”  The interview was conducted some hours after Dong met with Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam in a meeting. During the meeting, Nguyen Ha Dong told Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam about his learning process and participation in the development of mobile games, including Flappy Bird, which was posted on app stores in May 2013, becoming famous 6 months later. After consulting with Ha Dong Nguyen, Deputy Prime Minister Vu Duc Dam encouraged the young app developer to continue to pursue his passion. The Deputy Prime Minister said that Nguyen Ha Dong’s initial success has resonated internationally, encouraging the game development community as well as the local software and mobile applications development and information technology community in general. TUOITRENEWS