Crushing it: why millions of people still can’t stop playing Candy Crush

Launched in 2012, the tile-matching puzzler quickly became ubiquitous on phones. More than 10 years later, 200 million people are still playing. Why?

A lot of us were, at one point, in love with our smartphones. In the early days of Android and iPhone, apps seemed designed to delight; throw a few quid at the app store in 2010 and you could be playing some cute game, often involving birds, or messing around with a lightsaber within minutes. Social media apps designed for phones let us post artfully casual photos in a few taps, for our friends to drop hearts on. It was fun, once.

But over time, it’s become a toxic relationship. The fun got sucked out of everything. Social media morphed into a hellscape designed to ensnare and enrage us, providing just enough of our friends’ posts to prevent us from actually quitting the platform but prioritising their own ads and algorithmic videos. Twitter used to be jokes and cat memes and now it’s … well, it’s X, and I know I’m not the only one who’s deleted it off their phone entirely. The experience of using apps, phones and the internet more generally has significantly degraded – and the same can be said for mobile games, most of which now give you about 83 seconds of entertainment before trying to extort you for a £7.99 monthly subscription or showing you misleading ads that are so fascinatingly terrible you can’t look away.