VietNamNet Bridge – Flappy Bird, a Vietnam-made mobile game, has been taken down from app stores by its developer. However, stories and images of the lovely bird have reappeared in sci-tech newspapers and forums these days.

1. McAfee, a security firm, has warned that 79 percent of the hundreds of cloned Flappy Birds are infected with malware, as reported by the The Telegraph.

The conclusion was made by McAfee after it examined 300 games that are clones of Flappy Bird, a very favorite game developed by a Vietnamese national, Nguyen Ha Dong.

McAfee’s experts said that, through the counterfeited apps, hackers can hijack users’ smartphones, allowing them to make calls, install more software, steal information and find users’ locations. Criminals can also set up root access rights in order to control everything on the devices, including recording incoming/outgoing calls and messages sent and received.

MobiFone, the biggest telecom service provider in Vietnam, has also warned its subscribers about the existence of counterfeit Flappy Birds, which can “pick smartphone users’ pockets”.

Flappy Bird-addicted smartphone users have been told to keep away from apps counterfeiting Flappy Bird which have been put into Google Play recently. The counterfeit apps may make smartphone users pay money for unused services and have private information exposed.

2. A game developer, Nate Murray, reportedly spent only four hours to create FlappySwift, which imitates Dong’s Flappy Bird. He developed the game with Swift, Apple’s new programming language.

All this just goes to show how popular Flappy Bird is in the world.

Murray has uploaded his app to GitHub, a forum for software developers, saying that FlappySwift was made compatible with the newly launched iOS 8.

3.Under the name “Flappy Bird: New Season”, the most perfectly cloned app of the real Flappy Bird has been dominating Apple’s app store.

Information found in the app store shows that the app was first uploaded on March 8 and a 2.0 updated version was put into the store on May 9.

Unlike other cloned versions, “Flappy Bird: New Season” is exactly similar to the original version, from the graphics style to the playing rules.

It was a big surprise that the developer of “Flappy Bird: New Season” reported the name “Dong Nguyen” (which nearly coincides with Flappy Bird’s Nguyen Ha Dong). The author also reported the name of his studio – dotGears, which coincides with Dong’s studio name.

Thanks to the Flappy Bird’s fame, the counterfeit “Flappy Bird: New Season” now tops the list of the free apps with most downloads to iPhones from the British App Store and ranks fourth among the apps with most downloads for iPads (the other three are Microsoft Office apps).

4.Sources say that Nguyen Ha Dong, the father of the real Flappy Bird, plans to file lawsuits against the games cloning his creation, that is, games similar to the original game’s name and gameplay.

The plaintiff may be dotGears Studio, a firm founded by Dong Nguyen.

Analysts have commented that this is really a wise move for Dong to take, given that he is preparing for the return of the real Flappy Bird, slated for August 2014.

Compiled by Kim Chi