The new hit game sweeping app stores across both Android and iOS is Wordle, a web-based word game created by Josh Wardle. Except, fun fact: none of them are the true Wordle. They’re all imposters.
Wordle has gone by the way of other extremely popular app games across the internet, where they remain relatively undiscovered initially, then get massively popular all of a sudden, then clones pop up, users go looking for the actual game, and surprise! The original is nowhere to be found, leaving app stores riddled with buggy, sub-par rip-offs in return. This is almost verbatim what happened to Flappy Bird, with its clones still hanging out around the App Store and Google Play Store to this day, despite the original creator having removed his creation from platforms ages ago. Josh Wardle’s creation is a bit different, however, in that it was never on app stores in the first place. The product manager and software engineer has only ever uploaded the game to his website, powerlangauge.co.uk, with users being able to access it from there and nowhere else. However, are clones ever going to give in? Absolutely not, of course.
Wordle’s a pretty fun game to play. The premise is that users are assigned a word, and have six tries in order to guess what it is. The letters from each try will reveal whether or not they were correctly placed (signified with a green shade), or are present in the actual word, just incorrectly placed (given a yellow shade). It’s the sort of scrabble-esque game that people play on their phones all day. Which, to be fair, you can: the game is easily accessible via website and doesn’t really require any downloads. Josh Wardle’s placed in a daily timer, which means that users are only allowed to guess one word a day. This means that users can’t really cheat, which is a necessary measure since everyone gets the same word.
This was most probably nothing more than a tiny pet project that blew up, but theft of intellectual property is something the internet specializes in. Only recently, the App Store banned tens of Wordle clones from the platform. I’d typically expect other app stores to do the same, but I doubt Google Play’s ever going to pay this much attention to any security measure on the platform.
Read next: How the Web Hosting Industry Changed in 2021
Wordle has gone by the way of other extremely popular app games across the internet, where they remain relatively undiscovered initially, then get massively popular all of a sudden, then clones pop up, users go looking for the actual game, and surprise! The original is nowhere to be found, leaving app stores riddled with buggy, sub-par rip-offs in return. This is almost verbatim what happened to Flappy Bird, with its clones still hanging out around the App Store and Google Play Store to this day, despite the original creator having removed his creation from platforms ages ago. Josh Wardle’s creation is a bit different, however, in that it was never on app stores in the first place. The product manager and software engineer has only ever uploaded the game to his website, powerlangauge.co.uk, with users being able to access it from there and nowhere else. However, are clones ever going to give in? Absolutely not, of course.
Wordle’s a pretty fun game to play. The premise is that users are assigned a word, and have six tries in order to guess what it is. The letters from each try will reveal whether or not they were correctly placed (signified with a green shade), or are present in the actual word, just incorrectly placed (given a yellow shade). It’s the sort of scrabble-esque game that people play on their phones all day. Which, to be fair, you can: the game is easily accessible via website and doesn’t really require any downloads. Josh Wardle’s placed in a daily timer, which means that users are only allowed to guess one word a day. This means that users can’t really cheat, which is a necessary measure since everyone gets the same word.
This was most probably nothing more than a tiny pet project that blew up, but theft of intellectual property is something the internet specializes in. Only recently, the App Store banned tens of Wordle clones from the platform. I’d typically expect other app stores to do the same, but I doubt Google Play’s ever going to pay this much attention to any security measure on the platform.
Read next: How the Web Hosting Industry Changed in 2021