Wordle is being punished by app stores for choosing the open web
If you’ve been on Twitter lately, you’ve probably noticed your timeline drowning in grey, green and yellow squares. Those posts are thanks to Wordle, a free word game that gives you six tries or fewer to guess the correct word for the day.
The game is absolutely everywhere, growing from a handful of users to hundreds of thousands in a matter of weeks, despite being both free to play and originally built by a software engineer in Brooklyn, Josh Wardle, for his partner.
Wordle stands out in a world of in-app purchases and loot boxes because it’s free to play, has no advertising at all, and most importantly, is played on a simple website, rather than requiring an app to be downloaded from Apple’s App Store or Google Play.
The choice to make Wordle a web app, rather than something downloaded from a store makes sense, given that it was developed as a passion project rather than by a business, and it’s a simple, fun game that isn’t really designed to make money.
A side effect of that choice, however, is that Wordle is suddenly being ripped off in app stores by other developers who smell a quick way to make money off of unsuspecting users that either don’t care or don’t know any better.
