Zynga's Newtoy Bringing iOS-Compatible Words With Friends To Android

Less than a month after NewToy's purchase by social game giant Zynga, the company has announced plans to bring a version of its hit iOS crossword board game Words With Friends to Android devices by the end of the month. In an announcement on the Words With Friends Facebook page, the company said the Android title would be fully compatible with the iOS version of the game, which the company said had been downloaded to over 10 million devices as of last October. Zynga released its first Android title, Texas Hold'em Poker, last November, and one month later announced plans to bring Facebook and iOS mega-hits FarmVille and Mafia Wars to the platform. Google's mobile operating system, which was recently seeing over 300,000 phone activations per day, is becoming increasingly attractive to game developers as an alternative to the still-dominant Apple App Store. Rovio released a free, ad-supported version of its top-selling Angry Birds on the platform last October, attracting over 7 million downloads despite some initial performance issues. And web-game portal Kongregate recently chose Android as the exclusive platform for its mobile Kongregate Arcade app. "Our background is all about the open web [and] the nice thing for us about Android is it's very open, too," Kongregate CEO Jim Greer told Gamasutra. Originally released on iOS in July, 2009, Words with Friends is available in both an ad-supported free version and paid versions designed for both the iPad and iPhone. A similar Wordfeud app for Android has attracted over 250,000 downloads since its release in October.