The number one free download on the App Store is no longer Angry Birds, thanks to a 14-year-old kid.
While many 14-year-olds are busy cursing at adults in online multiplayer games of Call of Duty: Black Ops, Robert Nay toils away at game development. The 8th grader not only learned how to program his own iPhone game, but actually released it to hugely successful results.
Nay’s Bubble Ball has risen to the very top spot in the list of free downloads on the iOS App Store, unseating longtime champion Angry Birds. Bubble Ball was released on December 29, 2010, and has already been downloaded more than 2 million times. It’s also available on the Android marketplace, but is much more popular on the App Store.
Nay is apparently a computer whiz that figured out the easiest path to releasing an app. He created Bubble Ball with the help of Ansca Mobile’s Corona software development kit (SDK), which required the 14-year-old to learn the Lua programming language. Admittedly, Nay did enlist his mother as a level designer.
“I was pretty astonished,” Nay told ABC News. “When I released it, I didn’t think it would do so well.”
Nay forgot to include a way for he and his family to make some money off Bubble Ball, but he’s a kid so cut him some slack. Nay plans to put his newfound popularity to good use in the future and already has a paid app in the works. Maybe he’ll be kind and wait 10 years to release it, because he’s making everyone that’s not a teenager anymore look bad.
Source: ABC News
