Following Dong Nguyen, Flappy Bird's creator, interview about his plans of bringing the game back into the app store, the bird game's popularity may be threatened by a puzzle game called 2048, the newest rising online craze.

2048 is a single-player mobile game with a similar concept to Threes by Asher Vollmer. The game is quite difficult to fathom at first glance, but scrolling the arrow keys, players will find out what the game is all about. It is a puzzle like Candy Crush but it uses numbers.

Mobile gamers who are not interested playing using numbers, 2048 comes in variants. One variant is called Dodge 2048 and another is a Flappy Bird-inspired game called Logarithmic Flappy 2048. These games, like the Flappy Bird can be addictive, and as for the latter being credited for its difficulty, 2048 is making noise because it is easy to understand, and the case is for the math geeks.

Gabriele Cirulli, creator of the rising mobile game, is a 19-year-old Italian programmer and developer. He open-sourced 2048 in Github and receives much attention since its launch on March 9. Three days after the launch, Cirulli posted a tweet that there are 28,000 people playing the game. He also gave an estimate that in its first week online, 2048 got 520 years of play time computed collectively. Thus, "The amount of man-hours spent playing this game will never be returned to humanity," Cirulli statement on his tweet explained.

2048 is being pitted against Flappy Bird which gained worldwide popularity in a small span of time after its launch. Though both gained popularity in almost similar way, 2048 is not downloadable unlike the Flappy Bird. Cirulli warned users against imitation applications, with claims that some developers are impersonating him on Google Play store to increase downloads, according to CNET.

2048 is free. Be careful about apps for sale as "official" in the App/Play Store. The original game is found at http://t.co/zaPLfvCSwK

— Gabriele Cirulli (@gabrielecirulli) March 13, 2014

Cirulli also made it a point that he is not monetizing 2048 when he was asked by a fellow Twitter user. The tweet goes:

.@yel_juliene no, I have no plans to monetize 2048. I want it to be free and playable by anyone who enjoys playing it. — Gabriele Cirulli (@gabrielecirulli) March 14, 2014

Meanwhile, there is no confirmed report when Flappy Bird will be back in the app stores. In Dong Nguyen's interview with the Rolling Stones, he said his plans to bringing the game back, but not right away.

Which do you think is better; Flappy Bird or 2048?

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