Flappy Bird hasn’t graced the Apple App Store in years, not since rapid rise in popularity back in 2014 for the creator, just as quickly took it offlineNow the wildly addicting mobile game is reincarnated in a form that no one expected: an interactive macOS notification.
Using the new suite of customization tools added with Apple’s macOS Big Sur update, iOS engineer Neil Sardesai has successfully put a fully playable version of the game in a push notification. It’s technical a clone of the original created by PlayCanvas creator Will Eastcott with a significantly smaller file size (28KB) making it a perfect match given the strict memory limitations of the user interface framework for user notification.
Flappy Bird is not the first game that Sardesai managed to squeeze into Apple’s interfaces. He previously made the classic game Pong playable as an icon on the Mac dock and fit into Google Chrome’s iconic browser game Dino Runner in the Mac menu bar.
“Lately, I’ve been trying to find fun ways to push the boundaries of different macOS APIs,” he told Gizmodo via email on Sunday.
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When browsing through Apple’s documentation About the framework for creating and customizing user notifications, he noted that the latest version of macOS allows developers to add “interactive controls” to notifications. Apple suggests a few possible uses for developers, such as adding buttons or switches, but Sardesai went a step further and decided instead to “try to embed a game in a notification.”
He presented the finished product On Twitter this week with mouse clicks replacing the screen tap players used in the original Flappy Bird moving forward. Spoiler alert: It’s just as frustrating as you remember.
It’s safe to assume that when Apple decided to add interactive capabilities to its notifications, it didn’t really have game development in mind. You have to admire its ingenuity, and I love that it has become the internet’s unofficial mission to find the most surprising technology you can program to run video games.
And yes, before you say anything, we already asked Sardesai the inevitable question: Can it run Doom
Doom a push message would be impressive, ”he said. “Worth trying!”