Temple Run, the free-to-play mobile game developed by Imangi Studios, has broken 10 million downloads on Android. The title has been downloaded 36 million times on iOS devices.

Keith Shepherd, the founder of the studio, announced the news on Twitter. The game launched just over three weeks ago for Android on Google Play, which received over a million downloads during the first three days of availability. Originally, the title launched as a paid app for iOS at $0.99, with in-app purchases, but took off after becoming free-to-play. The app averaged half a million downloads every day since the switch in September last year. Co-founder Natalia Luckyanova said the game spread by word of mouth.

"The game is extremely sticky: once people start playing it, they play for a while. That means that day to day, the number of daily users is growing. Not only that, but people really like talking about the game and competing for high scores. There were a lot of Temple Run mentions on Twitter right away. So we think it pretty much spread by word of mouth," she said in an interview with Gamasutra during January this year.

Back in February, over 36 million downloads were logged. Copycat titles such as Temple Jump appeared on the App Store, but were removed by Apple

Temple run is a 3D third-person endless running game, similar to Cannabalt, where users have to jump over and avoid obstacles by tapping and swiping on the screen. Surviving earns points, which can be spent on power ups such as the temporary ability to avoid obstacles and to accelerate at the start of each run. In-app purchases allow users to get abilities quickly in exchange for money.

Shepherd and Luckyanova are married, and developed other mobile games that did well enough for them to set up a business. The company is made up of three people - the couple and an artist, Kiril Tchangov - and is "completely self-funded" according to Luckyanova in an interview with VentureBeat in February.

An update, available now on Google play, brings Twitter integration and bug fixes.

(reported by Jonathan Charles, edited by Surojit Chatterjee)