Wordle's popularity led to a surge of downloads for an app of the same name that released 5 years before: "It changed my life forever"

Before Wordle, there was another Wordle, which changed its creator's life when the other one went viral thanks to people searching the app store.

Wordle is one of those phenomena that you don't get all too often. Outside of something like Candy Crush, Pokemon Go, or Animal Crossing: New Horizons, I can't think of many games that went so viral it felt like you couldn't go a day without hearing about it. Given its popularity with nearly everyone, it's only natural that some who were perhaps a bit less tech savvy would be steered in the wrong direction, which seemed to be the case.

Wordle is a browser game, but for a lot of people hearing about the viral game, their first port of call was the Apple App Store, which is where they found Wordle, but not that one.

Mobile developer Steven Cravotta recalls a story on Twitter about Wordle's popularity. "When I was 17 years old (2016) I built a mobile app called Wordle… it was downloaded about 100k times before I gave up on the project," Cravotta says, adding: "It sat in my Apple developer account, until in 2021 another developer named Josh build a web app game, also called Wordle. Josh's game went viral globally. A lot of people searching for his game went to the App Store and downloaded mine instead."

Apple did take efforts to take down fake Wordle clones trying to take advantage of unsuspecting downloaders, but as Cravotta's game was released half a decade earlier, you can't take away "the OG." Cravotta writes: "Apple wiped out all the competition. I was the only 'Wordle' on the App Store. My little mobile app ended up being downloaded over 10M times in the span of a few weeks. It changed my life forever."

While obviously Cravotta's game is not in this camp, with success like that it's no surprise that you see people release games with similar names to capitalize on the popularity of viral hits. We've seen it recently with the drug dealing sim Schedule 1 which has had similarly named titles appear on both PlayStation and the Switch eShop.

You can find more mobile games to play on our list of the best Android games.