Flappy Bird has not gathered the Apple App Store for years, not since it was the meteoric rise in popularity in 2014 ahead of its creator just as fast took it offline. Now, the mobile game with captivating rage was reincarnated in a form no one expected: a MacOS interactive notification.
Using the new suite of customization tools added with Apple macOS Big Sur update, iOS engineer Neil Sardesai has successfully completed a fully rendered version of the game in a push notification. It’s technical a clone from the original created by PlayCanvas creator Will Eastcott with a significantly smaller file size (28 KB), which makes it a perfect fit, given the strict memory limitations of Apple’s UI notification framework.
Flappy Bird it’s not the first game Sardesai has managed to get into Apple’s interfaces. Previously, he made the classic game Pong playable as an icon on the Mac dock and matches the iconic Google Chrome 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 documentation in 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 some potential uses for developers, such as adding buttons or switches, but Sardesai did things a step further, deciding instead to “try to incorporate a game into a notification.”
He introduced final product on Twitter this week, with mouse clicks, replacing the screen, touch the players used in the original Flappy Bird to progress. Spoiler alert: it’s as frustrating as you remember.
It’s safe to assume that when Apple decided to add interactive capabilities to its notifications, it didn’t exactly consider game development. You have to admire the ingenuity and I like that it has become the unofficial mission of the internet to find the most amazing technology you can program to run video games.
And yes, before I said anything, I had already asked Sardesai the inevitable question: Can run Doom?
“Doom in a push notification it would be impressive, “he said. “Worth a try!”