The App Store clones are here to profit off Wordle’s success
Wordle, the word-guessing puzzle game that’s taken over our Twitter timelines, doesn’t currently have an official app. That may come as a surprise to anyone who’s searched for it on the App Store, though — earlier today, doing so would show you several blatant unofficial copies, each of which use the same name and mechanics as the original, which was made by Josh Wardle and distributed on the web for free.
Most people who’ve been online recently will have had at least some exposure to Wordle if they haven’t been playing it themselves (The Guardian reports it has 2 million daily players). It’s a simple concept but done well: each day, you go to the Wordle website, where you’re given six chances to guess a five-letter word. The game gives you feedback about what letters you’ve put in the right place, what letters are in the word, but not in the order you’ve picked and what letters aren’t in the correct answer. Certain parts of Twitter have been taken over by black, green, and yellow square emojis, which players use to show off their gameplay without spoiling the word of the day.
As happens to most good ideas (especially the ones that go viral), there have been several clever parodies of Wordle, along with waves of jokes on Twitter using the emoji block format that players use to share their scores. But while many of the parody versions point users back to the original, this doesn’t seem to be the case for the versions on the App Store. Instead, they try their best to look like the web version without mentioning that they’re actually a spin-off. Trying out five versions of the game from the App Store, only one seemed to acknowledge Wardle’s version — ironically, it was one of the few that didn’t actually call itself Wordle.
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