TAG · 31 REVIEWS
Long rebuild
Every App Comrade review tagged Long rebuild, across every platform.
Pokémon GO is still the only AR game anyone actually plays outside.
A decade in, Niantic's location-based monster collector is the rare phone game whose core loop only works if you leave the house — and the rare live-service title to outlive its own studio's independence.
MAY 11, 2026
Temple Run 2 is somehow still running, thirteen years in.
Imangi keeps shipping new maps to the same swipe-jump-slide loop from 2013, and on iPhone there is no Temple Run 3 to graduate to.
MAY 11, 2026
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.
MAY 11, 2026
Minion Rush is the endless runner Gameloft refuses to retire.
Thirteen years after launch, the Despicable Me runner keeps shipping costumes and crossover events while quietly inheriting every monetisation habit the genre learned along the way.
MAY 11, 2026
My Talking Tom on iPhone is a thirteen-year-old pet that still refuses to retire.
Outfit7's virtual cat has outlived three iPhone redesigns and a generation of its own players. The iOS version is the cleanest place to meet him.
MAY 11, 2026
Castle Clash is still standing twelve years after the rush ended.
IGG's 2013 base-builder outlasted most of its Clash-era contemporaries by treating hero collection as the actual game and the base as the scoreboard.
MAY 11, 2026
Peloton's app is finally the product the bike used to be.
Stripped of the $2,500 hardware tether, the app-only tier is a credible standalone fitness studio — if you can stomach the subscription stack.
MAY 11, 2026
Hungry Shark Evolution is the commute game Android never quite outgrew.
Thirteen years in, Ubisoft's free-to-play arcade survival game still runs on almost any Android phone in a pocket — and still wants you to buy gems.
MAY 11, 2026
Asphalt 8 on Android is the racer that grew up with the hardware.
Thirteen years on, Gameloft's flagship arcade racer is the rare Android game that scales gracefully from a Pixel 4a to a ROG Phone — and the rare one that still rewards a Bluetooth controller more than a touchscreen.
MAY 11, 2026
1Weather has spent a decade being the friendly weather app on Android, and it shows in both directions.
A 4.33 Play Store rating across 274,000+ users says the long-running Handmark app still earns its keep — even as a 2012-era information architecture quietly competes with a Pro tier that exists mostly to hide the ads.
MAY 11, 2026
PewDiePie's Tuber Simulator is a 2016 time capsule that keeps shipping updates.
Outerminds' clicker about climbing the YouTube rankings launched at the absolute peak of PewDiePie's cultural footprint. A decade later, it's still on the store, still patched, and still a strange little artefact of internet history.
MAY 11, 2026
Toca Boca World is the open-ended dollhouse a generation of kids actually built itself.
Sweden's Toca Boca rolled twenty years of standalone Toca apps into one persistent sandbox. There are no scores, no quests, and no fail states — and kids cannot put it down.
MAY 11, 2026
Tumblr is still the strangest place on the social web, and the Android app is still its weakest link.
Sixteen years in, the dashboard is irreplaceable and the app is held together with tape. Automattic owns it now. The community remembers everything.
MAY 11, 2026
Reddit on Fire is the official app and nothing more.
Three years after killing Apollo, two years after the IPO, and a $60M-a-year Google data deal later, the only Reddit app that exists on Amazon's tablets is the one Reddit makes — and it's the one nobody asked for.
MAY 10, 2026
PayPal stopped pretending it was just a checkout button.
The 2024 home-screen redesign reframed the app as a wallet — balance, Pay Later, rewards, crypto, savings — and most of it actually fits.
MAY 10, 2026
Pizza Hut's app finally treats loyalty like the reason you opened it.
The April 2026 Hut Rewards relaunch turned the membership into the front door of the app — which is good, because the order tracker still trails Domino's by a country mile.
MAY 10, 2026
MyFitnessPal on iPhone is a fast tracker stapled to a slow business decision.
The 2024 iOS rebuild made logging genuinely quick, and Apple Health sync is finally bidirectional — but the barcode paywall and the iPad app are still the parts the company won't fix.
MAY 10, 2026
Fruit Ninja is still the cleanest swipe on the App Store.
Fifteen years on, Halfbrick's slice-and-combo game survives the free-to-play rebuild that buried half its 2010 contemporaries.
MAY 10, 2026
Subway Surfers is still running, fourteen years in.
SYBO's endless runner outlived the genre it helped define by treating the game as a touring product — a new city every few weeks, indefinitely.
MAY 10, 2026
Clash of Clans is the rare mobile game that aged into an institution.
Thirteen years in, Supercell's village-builder is still adding Town Halls and still running clan wars every weekend. The genre moved on. Clash didn't have to.
MAY 10, 2026
Asphalt 8 is the arcade racer that refused to retire.
Thirteen years after launch, Gameloft's flagship is still the cleanest free arcade racer on iOS — provided you can ignore the token economy bolted on around it.
MAY 10, 2026
Boom Beach is the Supercell strategy game that never got the sequel.
Twelve years in, the amphibious-assault base-builder still has the cleanest combat loop in the catalogue — and the smallest player base of the three.
MAY 10, 2026
Fallout Shelter is the surprise hit Bethesda hasn't been able to top on mobile.
A decade after its E3 2015 ambush release, the vault sim still teaches more about base management than most premium tycoon games — and the lunch boxes still nudge.
MAY 10, 2026
Egg, Inc. is the idle game that respects your wallet.
Auxbrain's nine-year-old hen-farming sim keeps shipping content while refusing the dark patterns that define its genre. Ads are optional, IAPs are voluntary, and the long-tail loop still rewards showing up.
MAY 10, 2026
Trivia Crack is still spinning the wheel, twelve years on.
Etermax's 2013 viral hit added an AI-powered quiz creator in 2026 and lost some of the friction that made it social. The wheel, the six characters, and Willy are all still here — and so are the ads.
MAY 10, 2026
Netflix on Android keeps adding tabs and forgetting the basics.
The 2026 redesign bolts a vertical Clips feed onto a player that still hides Continue Watching, punishes ad-tier viewers, and quietly raised the price again.
MAY 10, 2026
House of Fun keeps the lights flashing and the wallet open.
Playtika's other social-casino flagship leans on costume-party themes and a relentless bonus cadence. The slot variety is real; the monetisation arithmetic is not in your favour.
MAY 10, 2026
Classic Words With Friends is Zynga's quiet refuge from its own sequel.
The 2009 original is still on the Play Store fifteen years later, kept alive for players who want a tile rack and a chat box and not much else. The ads have caught up with it anyway.
MAY 10, 2026
Monster Legends turned breeding into a slot machine and never stopped pulling the lever.
Social Point's monster-collector is a decade-old free-to-play battler with a deep roster, real strategic combat, and an economy designed to make patience expensive.
MAY 10, 2026
Bear stayed great by refusing to become an everything app.
The 2023 rebuild added tables, footnotes, and offline files without losing the singular focus that made the original feel like a real writing app.
MAY 7, 2026
Notion's mobile rebuild finally feels native.
After two years of clunky workarounds, the new iOS app rewrites everything in SwiftUI. Pages open instantly, offline edits actually sync, and the gesture system feels designed instead of ported.
MAY 5, 2026 · EDITOR'S PICK