Someone brought Flappy Bird back to Android, but there’s a good reason you shouldn’t download it

If, like me, you had an Android phone in the 2010s, you almost certainly played Flappy Bird. And all these years later, I still occasionally find myself itching to play a few rounds. Unfortunately, playing the original Flappy Bird in 2025 is all but impossible.

But thanks to one developer, Flappy Bird is back. Recently, a new developer got the attention of the r/Android subreddit by announcing they had reverse-engineered the original Flappy Bird to run on a 64-bit Java platform, meaning you can download and play Flappy Bird just as you remember on a modern Android phone.

It’s a pretty cool project, and I was almost ready to download the app myself. However, after taking a closer look, I decided not to download this new version of Flappy Bird, and you probably shouldn’t either.

There are a couple of red flags with this Flappy Bird app, the first of which is what the developer didn’t do. The GitHub page includes the APK file for downloading the game on your phone, but there’s no source code available.

In other words, you’re being asked to download an APK onto your Android phone without being able to see what’s happening behind the scenes. And that’s a problem. Downloading APK files isn’t inherently bad or harmful, but you should only do so from trusted developers, who typically publish the APK source code so you can confirm the file doesn’t contain anything nefarious.

But that didn’t happen here. Not only did the developer not publish their source code, but this Flappy Bird project is the first thing they’ve ever published to GitHub, meaning they don’t have any previous vettable projects.

Another red flag is that multiple people have reported finding a Trojan file (specifically, “Trojan:Script/Wacatac.B!ml”) in security scans of the APK. The developer says this is “likely” a false positive and that “virus scans are clear for most users,” but it still adds more concern to an already dubious application. And as if that wasn’t enough, a few hours after I started writing this, the entire project was pulled from GitHub, with the APK file now being hosted on MediaFire. That, friends, is not a good look.

To recap, what we’re dealing with is:

• A developer with no previous development history.
• An APK file with no accompanying source code.
• Multiple reports of a Trojan file in the application.
• The project being removed from GitHub.
• The APK now being distributed via MediaFire.

There are a couple of ways to look at this. On the one hand, it’s entirely possible that this Flappy Bird game is perfectly harmless. There’s nothing wrong with being a new developer, as everyone has to start somewhere. The person behind the Flappy Bird project has also stated that the source code is coming soon, and those Trojan warnings may actually be false positives, as the developer claims.

But on the other hand, it’s hard not to view this whole thing with a dose of skepticism. Why isn’t the source code available? Will it really be released soon, and what if those Trojan warnings are legit?

This Flappy Bird game might be perfectly fine, but there’s also a possibility that it’s not — and the GitHub removal makes that possibility even stronger. Until the source code is published, you’re just putting yourself at unnecessary risk by downloading the APK. If it turns out that the game is legit, great! However, until we know for sure, I wouldn’t download this on my Android phone at all.

If you’re itching to play Flappy Bird on your Android phone right now, the good news is that you can — and you can do it safely.

A couple of months ago, another version of Flappy Bird launched on Epic Games Store for Android. It’s not a 1:1 recreation of the original game, but it gets pretty darn close while also adding some new features and game modes. Unlike this new Flappy Bird APK, you can trust that the one on the Epic Games Store has been vetted by Epic and is safe to have on your phone.

At the end of the day, this is a good reminder to always be vigilant about downloading Android apps from unknown sources. You can never be too careful with these things, and no matter how much you like Flappy Bird, it’s not worth potentially exposing yourself to something harmful just to play it.