Swing Copters, the new (and immensely difficult) mobile game from Flappy Bird creator .GEARS Studios, is now top in Play Store search rankings after Google cleared out a surprisingly long list of clones. Literally hundreds of them littered the Play Store on Thursday, making the original hard to find without a direct link.

Thanks to Flappy Bird’s incredible success, the newest title from .GEARS was always going to gain a wealth of attention. Lots of developers saw an opportunity to cash in on that by creating knockoff titles with similar names and icons that might fool unsuspecting Play Store users into downloading their game instead of the real thing.

Of course, those clones were built for the sole purpose of making a quick buck, so most of them were poor, plagued by bugs, and full of disruptive ads. Some of them were even convincing enough to fool players into thinking they were playing the official Swing Copters game.

As a result of all this, Swing Copters hasn’t been as successful on Android as it has on iOS. Earlier today, it was ranked 7th on the App Store’s free chart, but it didn’t even feature in the top 300 free downloads on Google Play. That should change very quickly.

Google has now wiped all of those clones out of Google Play, putting the original title at the top spot for a Swing Copters search. This will make it easier for customers to find the game, and should lead to significantly more downloads than it was receiving before.

• ViaThe Guardian
• Google Play StoreSwing Copters