iPhone app has 2 million fans

Teen's iPhone app has 2 million fans

The time may have come for those irate avians and thieving pigs to cease hostilities and join forces against a new and even less likely enemy.

Angry Birds, the time-wasting phenomenon that has ruled the smartphone roost for the last year, has finally been vanquished by a 14-year-old boy and the game he devised with the help of his mum and the local library.

On paper, Robert Nay's Bubble Ball – described as a "fun, new physics puzzle game" – does not look quite as thrilling as Angry Birds, which ushers players into an inexplicable realm where they can catapult feathered missiles into a variety of structures that shelter the green pigs who have stolen their eggs.

But the Utah wonderboy's brainchild has now been downloaded more than 2m times and last week knocked Angry Birds off its perch at the top of the free games in Apple's iTunes store.

And whereas the bird bombardment was devised by the 17-strong team at the Finnish game-making company Rovio, Bubble Ball was the result of little more than peer pressure and some serious after-school dedication.

"Since [his friends] know Robert's good with computers, they suggested that he should make one," Nay's mother, Kari, told ABC News.

The teenager accepted their challenge and went to the public library to investigate programs that would help him build his game.

Even with a little design help from his mum, however, it was not easy. "There were some times when I felt like, 'Can people seriously do this?' It seemed impossible," said Nay. "But then there were times when things just worked and I would be like: 'Maybe I can actually do this'."

Eventually, after more than a month and 4000 lines of code, he cracked it, and Bubble Ball – which "will test your ingenuity and thinking skills to get the bubble to the goal" – was born.

On 29 December last year, his company, Nay Games, launched an Apple-compatible version of the app. Within a fortnight, the game had caught the eye of the industry.

According to Carlos Icaza – the co-founder of Ansca Mobile, the company which makes the software developer's kit that Nay used, Bubble Ball quickly "brought the entire staff to a halt".

The key, he told ABC, was the game's apparent straightforwardness. "Because it's so simple, I think I can beat it," he said. "You go 'yeah right', and then you realise there's a lot of little tricks to make this actually work."

Ten days ago, Ansca chose Bubble Ball as its app of the week and it began creeping up the apps ladder.

Having dispatched the Angry Birds with vulpine ferocity, Nay is now giving some thought to his future.

Not surprisingly, he is keen to work in computing and is thinking of ways to make money from his talent. The next download, he said, would probably be one that smartphone users had to pay for. But when asked for more detail on how he might outdo the success, and addictiveness, of Bubble Ball, he remained cagey: "It's a secret for now."

News From: abcnews.go.com