Apple / games / POU
REVIEW
Pou is a fourteen-year-old virtual pet that refuses to die.
The brown alien from 2012 still launches on a current iPhone, still asks to be fed, and still costs less than a coffee — a small miracle in an App Store that buries anything older than last fiscal quarter.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
Pou launched in November 2012, two months after the iPhone 5 went on sale, into an App Store still figuring out what a casual game was. It looked like a brown blob with eyes, asked to be fed and bathed and put to bed, and sold tens of millions of downloads on the back of a single idea borrowed from a 1996 keychain toy. Then it stayed.
That staying is the story. Almost everything else Pou competed with in 2012 — Pocket Frogs, Tiny Tower’s first incarnation, the original Smurfs’ Village wave — is either delisted, abandoned, or has been rewritten into something its 2012 audience wouldn’t recognise. Pou is still Pou. Same brown alien, same four meters, same shop full of hats. The developer, Zakeh Limited, has kept the App Store build current; the most recent update shipped in April 2026. That is the work.
What you’re buying for $1.99 on iOS today is less a game than a small monument: a fourteen-year-old virtual pet that still loads, still saves locally, still asks for breakfast. It is not modern, it is not deep, and it is not what an adult reviewer would call good. But it is the rare older app whose price hasn’t moved, whose model hasn’t been replaced with a subscription, and whose author hasn’t disappeared. For the parents installing this on a child’s first iPad — which, anecdotally from the App Store reviews, is most of the audience — that combination is the entire point.
Almost nothing from the 2012 cohort of casual iOS games is still installable on a current iPhone. Pou is.
FEATURES
Pou is a virtual pet. You feed it, bathe it, put it to sleep, and watch a meter for hunger, health, energy, and fun tick down whether the app is open or not. The interaction loop is the one millions of children learned on a Tamagotchi keychain: a needy creature, four bars, a small cycle of chores.
Around that loop sit roughly twenty mini-games — a Flappy Bird clone, a memory match, a sky jumper, a colour-match puzzle, a maze. Win coins, spend them in shops that sell wallpapers, hats, glasses, and clothes for Pou. There is a leveling system, an achievements grid, and a customisation room where you can repaint Pou's skin and the walls of its house. The whole thing is single-player, offline-capable, and works on an iPhone that hasn't seen wi-fi in a week.
The iOS build is a paid download at $1.99 — no subscription, no rewarded-video unlocks, no energy timers gating the next mini-game. The Google Play version of Pou is free and ad-supported; the Apple version is the cleaner deal.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The remarkable thing about Pou in 2026 is that it still launches. Almost nothing from the 2012 cohort of casual iOS games is still installable on a current iPhone — the App Store quietly delists anything its developer doesn't recompile, and the long tail of one-hit casual games from that era is mostly gone. Pou's developer, Zakeh Limited, has kept shipping compatibility updates. The most recent one landed in April 2026.
For the audience that actually plays this — children, mostly, and the parents who installed it on a hand-me-down iPad — that maintenance is the entire value. There is no nag screen asking you to subscribe to "Pou Premium". There is no battle pass. You pay once, the alien lives in your phone, and the loop works.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
Pou shows its age the moment you look at it. The art is flat 2012-era cartoon, the animations are short loops, the UI is a grid of icons that doesn't pretend to be modern. The mini-games are functional but unremarkable — none of them are good enough to play on their own, which means the whole experience leans on the pet-care loop for its hook.
There is no iCloud sync, so Pou lives on whichever device you installed it on. Lose the phone, lose the pet. There is no Apple Watch companion, no Live Activity, no widget — none of the modern iOS hooks that would let Pou tell you it's hungry without you opening the app. The Tamagotchi this descends from at least beeped.
CONCLUSION
Pou is not a great game and was never trying to be one. It is a fourteen-year-old virtual pet that still runs, still costs the same $1.99 it always cost, and still does the one thing it was built to do. Buy it for a six-year-old, buy it as a curio, or skip it if you want anything from the last decade of mobile game design. The fact that it is still here at all is the review.