Gaming

Fidget Spinner App Gets 7 Million Downloads

• By Sri Ravipati
• 06/02/17

An iOS and Android app that digitizes fidget spinners, a children’s toy, has been downloaded more than 7 million times.

Fidget spinners have grown in popularity in the last couple of months, and businesses worldwide are jumping to meet the demand. Some schools in the United States are banning these handheld gadgets that were supposedly made with the intention of helping students with special needs, such as attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and anxiety, feel at ease and relieve stress. Many administrators and teachers find these gadgets to be too distracting for use in the classroom, while others have said they are being used dangerously, The Washington Post reported. Schools in at least 11 states have banned fidget spinners.

Meanwhile, other schools have hopped onto the trend bandwagon and are using fidget spinners creatively during class time. One elementary school in California, for example, is using fidget spinners in math classes to “randomly select math problems to solve, write how-to manuals, and work on verbal communication skills,” according to a local news report.

In any case, these toys are as popular in app-form as they are in real life. There are already a few hundred fidget spinner apps combined across the Apple App Store and Google Play. One app is by far leading the pack  — Fidget Spinner from Ketchapp, a French video game company owned by Ubisoft, has reached 7 million downloads in about two weeks, Mashable first reported. For comparison, Pokemon Go, another mobile app that not too long ago swept schools nationwide, had 10 million downloads in a week.

Last week, Ketchapp’s Fidget Spinner game was in the No. 1 spot in the iTunes App Store as the most downloaded free iOS app. The app displays a fidget spinner on the screen and users need to swipe to spin — swiping faster to increase speed. Users can earn coins for their spins and use these to unlock other fidget spinners in the app.   

To learn more about the app, watch the video below. The game is available for free for iOS and Android.