Angry Birds available on Android for free, crashes company's website
Android. Angry Birds. Free. Got it? Good.
Beginning today, Rovio Mobile will offer the Android edition of its best-selling application for free, first through the download site GetJar.com, and then on the Android Marketplace. “We want to make Angry Birds available for as many people as possible," Rovio wrote in a press statement, according to the tech blog Mashable. By comparison, the full version of Angry Birds currently costs $.99 on Apple iTunes.
But the news of a free Angry Birds app was all apparently a bit much for the Rovio site, which crashed sometime this morning, and remains – as of about 1 p.m. – mostly out of action. "Oops! Due to the enormous traffic generated by the Android launch of Angry Birds, rovio.com is down," reads a note appended to the site. (The download links remain active – so you can still get your Angry Birds fix.)
It's been an interesting couple weeks for Rovio Mobile, a company based in Finland. On Oct. 10, one blogger located an advertisement for the new Windows 7 mobile operating system, which appeared to indicate that Angry Birds would be among the applications available at the WP7 launch. Rovio caught word of the ad, and quickly issued a denial via Twitter.
"We have NOT committed to doing a Windows Phone 7 version," Rovio reps wrote. "Microsoft put the Angry Birds icon on their site without our permission." In a subsequent post, a rep added that the company "could do a WP7 version of Angry Birds," but said that was "not the issue. We have not agreed to do that (yet). Will support all relevant platforms."
