BYU-Idaho Student Goes Viral with New App
May 13, 2013
A BYU-Idaho student, Jacob Holman, is the man behind an app that followed Flappy Bird in viral success. It’s patterned after a game by 19-year-old Italian designer/developer Gabriele Cirulli, who has the original verison of the game on his website. It’s a mix of another game and one called 1048 — but Cirulli reformatted it and made it simple to use and the result has been addictive. The point of the game is to match numbered tiles until you get the number 2048. Two “4” tiles make an “8,” two 8s make “16” and so on and so forth.
Holman used to play the game on the website and decided that it would do well as an app on his phone. He learned how to design the app through Youtube tutorials, “It’s amazing,” remarked Homan, “Some college kid can sit there and [the game can go out] to 800 million people, all through his phone.”
He’s already made money through advertising and two companies have offered to buy the game, but Holman is going to hold off on selling to see “where it goes.”
As for Cirulli, he said he doesn’t mind seeing the many clones of his game in the App Store and online, “As long as they add new creative content.”
You can find the app for free on the iTunes website and for Android devices and try it for yourself! Is it as addicting as they say it is?