Surely at some point in your life you’ve (either purposefully or accidentally) let a helium filled balloon loose into the air which then potentially went on to travel hundreds of miles before finally deflating enough to come back to Earth. There’s no shortage of sites detailing the dangers to wildlife of actually doing this, but what if you still want to release some balloons but without littering or causing other potential problems? Well, that’s where Floonr [Free] comes in.

Using this app (Calling it a “game" is likely a bit of a stretch.) you’re able to scroll around Google Maps to see other balloons that have been launched, as well as launch your own. These balloons float about as they would in the real world, until they eventually crash land in 150 miles or so. You can attach messages to your balloons and other people can comment on your balloons. Also, unlike a lot of real-world GPS-based games, there seems to be a surprising amount of activity in the app.

There’s a hefty amount of completely optional IAP such as stickers to add to your balloons as well as “power-ups" of sorts that do things like let your balloons float either longer or faster. I’m not entirely sure what the point of buying these is, but at least the option is there I suppose. Floonr isn’t a killer must-have app by any means, but it’s really cool how they’ve applied the activity of releasing balloons to a smartphone app and I’ve had a lot of fun reading what (often silly) messages there are attached to balloons virtually soaring overhead.