Clappy Bird app icon — a deep-purple bird with an orange beak on a pale disc against a blue sky

▶ COMING SOON  //  iOS + ANDROID

Clappy Bird

Hands off the glass.
Clap to fly.

A bird falls. A sharp sound — a clap, a shout, a snap, a whistle — shoves it back up. That is the entire control scheme: there is no touch input during play. You clap to start and you clap to stay up, and the phone can sit on the table the whole time. Level flight works out at about 1.51 claps a second — three claps every two seconds — which is not a number we picked: it falls out of the physics, and it is a comfortable rate for a pair of hands.

PRIVACY POLICY

Both store buttons are dead on purpose. Clappy Bird is not on the App Store and not on Google Play yet, so there is nothing behind them to link to — they become real links the day it is live, and not one day earlier.

▶ THE LOOP

HOW IT PLAYS

One input. It is not a finger.

Gravity is always on and the bird is always losing height. A sharp sound gives it one fixed shove upward — one sound, one flap, no matter how loud. Everything else in the game is the consequence of those two sentences: the pipes, the ceiling that kills you exactly as dead as the floor, and the fact that panic-clapping does nothing at all.

▶ THREE MODES, ONE SIMULATION

WHAT'S IN THE BOX

One physics engine, running at a fixed 120 Hz so a course lands identically on a cheap phone and an expensive one, with three things pointed at it. Nothing in here is generated while you wait: the 412 courses that ship — 12 lessons and 400 dailies — were each flown to the end by a solver through the real physics before they were allowed into the build. No player can be handed an impossible board.

▶ THE HONEST BIT

WHAT IT COSTS

Clappy Bird is free. Nothing you can buy makes the bird fly better, nothing expires or refills on a timer, and there is no energy meter because we did not build one. Money buys fewer interruptions and a faster route to a different-coloured bird. That is the whole list.

▶ ON THE RECORD

THE MICROPHONE QUESTION

It is the first thing anyone asks about a game you play by clapping, so here is the plain answer. The microphone is used only to measure how loud the room is. Audio is analysed for amplitude on your device, in memory, and is never recorded, never written to disk, and never transmitted anywhere. It is not speech recognition; it is not listening for words; there is no waveform kept, because the game never keeps one. The mic opens when you enter the game screen and closes when you leave it, and the only other place it ever opens is the Test my mic button in Settings. It is never open on a menu. Everything else stays local too — scores, coins, birds, Daily results and settings live in your phone's own storage, with no account and no server of ours anywhere. Exactly two things reach the network: Google's ad network, which serves the ads, and the App Store or Google Play, which handle purchases.

READ THE CLAPPY BIRD PRIVACY POLICY