Games like Fruit Ninja

The closest game to Fruit Ninja is Fruit Ninja, and Halfbrick Studios publishes four of them, each at its own price. Which one you want depends less on the game than on which phone you are holding.

Games like Fruit Ninja are mostly Fruit Ninja

A Google Play search for “fruit slicing game” returns Fruit Ninja, Fruit Ninja 2, Fruit Ninja Classic and Fruit Ninja Classic+ first, all from Halfbrick. The You Might Also Like shelf on Apple’s Fruit Ninja 2 listing recommends ten games — sharks, golf, three endless runners, a brick breaker — and none is a slicing game. So most of this page is about choosing between the four.

What the free Fruit Ninja costs, in Apple's two slots

Between the release notes and the privacy panel, Apple prints a promoted purchase: Game Theme - Bluey, $9.99. It appears only when a developer promotes an item in App Store Connect, so it is an advertising slot. On 6 September 2026 none of seven other listings read — Fruit Ninja Classic, Fruit Ninja 2 and Jetpack Joyride from the same studio, then Crossy Road, Subway Surfers, Flappy Dunk and ours — had one. The Information row lower down, expanded on 19 September 2026, lists ten items with prices.

Remove Popup Ads is $1.99, a fifth of the promoted theme. The cheap route out of the ads is published and not promoted, the same shape as Crossy Road’s ad removal. Google Play shows an In-app purchases badge and no In-game items and offers section for Fruit Ninja, Subway Surfers, PAC-MAN 256 or Jetpack Joyride, re-read on 7 September 2026.

The Fruit Ninja with nothing to buy, and what it costs

Fruit Ninja Classic+ has no ads and no in-app purchases: Apple’s page carries the Arcade line — play over 200 games, no ads, no in-app purchases — and no In-App Purchases row, and on Google Play it carries neither badge. On Android it costs $2.99, once. On iPhone and iPad it comes only with Apple Arcade, at $6.99 a month or $49.99 a year, with Family Sharing for up to five people and three months free on a new eligible device for new and qualified returning subscribers.

Derived: $49.99 a year is $4.17 a month. The $9.99 promoted theme is about two and a half months of the Arcade catalog, or a month and a half at the monthly rate, and roughly three and a third times the $2.99 that buys the whole clean game on Android. Across more than 200 games, $49.99 is about 25 cents a game a year, the case for the subscription. The cheapest Fruit Ninja with nothing to buy is the Android one, and it is not close.

The other price, and this one is itemized

Halfbrick filled in the data forms for every listing, so one studio and one game hold everything constant except the price. The free Fruit Ninja’s Play data safety page says it may share device or other IDs, user IDs, diagnostics, purchase history and approximate location with other companies, and that the data is not encrypted. The $2.99 Fruit Ninja Classic+ says no data shared with third parties and data is encrypted in transit. Apple agrees: Fruit Ninja names location, identifiers and usage data as used to track you, and Classic+ names Usage Data, not linked to you, and nothing under tracking.

Halfbrick’s other big game shows the same pattern. The free Jetpack Joyride lists six categories used to track you and eight linked to your identity, search history among them; Jetpack Joyride+ on Arcade lists one, Usage Data, not linked to you.

The four listings, and which is which

• Fruit Ninja Classic+ is the one to install if you can. 4.6 stars across 39,000 ratings on Apple, 4+, 411 MB, iOS 13 or later; 4.0 across 301 reviews and 10,000-plus downloads on Play, where it is $2.99 and plays offline. Its last Play update was 30 September 2025: the version nobody is monetizing is also the one nobody is shipping events into.
• Fruit Ninja is the one everybody means. Free with in-app purchases and, on Play, ads. 4.7 stars across 373,000 Apple ratings, 4.5 across 5.33 million Play reviews, 500 million-plus downloads, an Editors’ Choice badge and number five on Play’s top free arcade chart. 431.7 MB, 4+, iOS 13 or later, last updated 6 August 2026 on Apple and 21 August on Play.
• Fruit Ninja Classic is the older free listing, with in-app purchases and no ads badge on Play. The stores disagree about it: 4.7 stars across 27,000 ratings on Apple, 3.3 stars across 114,000 reviews on Play, and neither publishes anything that would explain it. 626.2 MB, 4+, iOS 14 or later, last updated 28 August 2026 on Apple and 30 October 2025 on Play.
• Fruit Ninja 2 is the 2020 sequel. It is rated 9+ for In-App Controls where the others are 4+, it is 1.1 GB against Fruit Ninja’s 431.7 MB, and its last Apple update was 26 January 2026, seven months behind the 2010 game it replaced. 4.7 across 117,000 Apple ratings and 4.1 across 63,600 on Play.

The slicers that are not Fruit Ninja

• Fruit Chef, from Freak X Games, is the only game here whose deal is ads and nothing else: a Contains ads badge, no in-app purchases badge, 3.6 stars across 443 reviews and 100,000-plus downloads, updated 21 August 2026. Its data safety page says no data is shared with third parties, and that data is not encrypted and cannot be deleted. Neither store publishes how many ads a game shows.
• Fruit Hero, from TouchRun, has a million-plus downloads and 4.4 stars across 5,560 reviews, the biggest non-Halfbrick result, and Play files it under Puzzle and Match 3. It is a matching game with fruit in it, returned eighth in a search for a slicing game. Read the genre tags before the screenshots.

Not slicers, but the same sixty seconds

• Jetpack Joyride is the same studio’s other fifteen-year-old hit and the closest to Fruit Ninja in feel: one thumb, runs under a minute. Free with in-app purchases, 4.7 stars across 103,000 ratings, Editors’ Choice, 9+, 418.4 MB, iOS 15.6 or later. It carries the heaviest data declaration on this page, and Jetpack Joyride+ on Arcade the lightest.
• Ours, last and not a slicer: Taco Rain is a sixty-second catcher — tacos fall, you slide a basket, bombs are the thing to miss. Fifty levels across five worlds, an endless mode, fourteen badges, five power-ups that fall as pickups. Free, 4+, 65.9 MB, iOS 15 or later, on Google Play since 28 August 2026 for Android 7.0 or later, rated Everyone, and on macOS under the same listing. No In-App Purchases row on Apple; identifiers, usage data and diagnostics not linked to you and nothing under tracking; a Contains ads badge on Play for one banner outside gameplay. 5+ downloads on Play and one rating on the App Store, five stars, read 14 September 2026. If you want to slice fruit, install a Fruit Ninja.

All of them side by side

Everything in the table comes from Apple, Google or the publisher, read on 6 September 2026, with Fruit Ninja’s Apple prices re-read on 19 September.

Read the last two columns as facts, not a ranking. Fruit Ninja has been updated every few weeks for fifteen years and Classic+ was last touched on Play in September 2025, and the version that sells something is the one that can afford those updates. Only Fruit Ninja’s Apple price list was recorded for this page; the other shops’ rows were not re-read.

What these games do better than ours

• Fruit Ninja is a genre and ours is a game. Half a billion downloads, 5.33 million Play reviews, 373,000 Apple ratings, Editors’ Choice and fifteen years of updates, against Taco Rain’s 5+ downloads on Play and one App Store rating.
• Halfbrick ships the clean version we cannot. Classic+ has no ads at all; ours is free because it carries a banner.
• Four listings leave the choice with you. A studio that keeps a paid, ad-free, purchase-free version of its own hit in both stores is offering something most publishers do not.
• Fruit Ninja 2 has things ours will not get: real-time competitive multiplayer, a fifteen-language listing, Game Center leaderboards and achievements, and iMessage support. Ours is English only and stores scores on the device.
• Ours is not a slicing game. Taco Rain is a catcher. If you came to cut fruit in half with your thumb, we do not make that.

Checking a listing yourself

On an App Store listing, expand the In-App Purchases row under Information and look just above the App Privacy panel for a promoted purchase; on Google Play, look below the description for In-game items and offers. Open the data safety page rather than reading its summary line: “Location, App activity and 2 others” hides the rest, and whether anything is encrypted. When a studio publishes the same game more than once, read every listing; the differences are the studio’s own account of what the free version is for.