Candy Crush addicts come clean: 'Life's too short for sliding candies around'

Candy Crush users spent $493m in 2013, leading to burned retinas and empty wallets. We scoured the web for tales of your app addiction

The number of glassy-eyed, finger-swiping Candy Crush Saga users who live among us is staggering: 93m people play this sweet little app more than 1bn times per day.

To be an addict, by definition, is to habituate to something compulsively or obsessively. Candy Crushers can be found riding trains and buses around the world, missing their stops, tripping onto platforms and wandering into crowds of people. They're sitting at the desk next to you, heads down, twitchy fingers trailing set of jelly-looking fruits. They search for quiet places to play, away from kids and spouses, and find themselves locked in the bathroom, trying not to drop the phone into the bathwater. Perhaps you are reading this with a blush of recognition.

 Photograph: Google

But this goes beyond Candy Crush. The field of addictive apps is crowded with the Tinders, assorted Flappys and 2048s of the world. (I am hooked on something called Tiny Tower, an older app which is actually horrible.) A couple of years ago, it was Angry Birds. It's is now time for some tales from the edge, collected from different corners of the internet.