Before arrow puzzle, there was the 15 Puzzle. Before touchscreens, there were wooden tiles. The sliding puzzle genre has a rich 140-year history that directly leads to the game you're playing today.
Invented by Noyes Palmer Chapman and popularized by Samuel Loyd, the 15 Puzzle was a wooden frame holding 15 numbered tiles with one empty space. The goal: slide tiles to arrange them in order. It caused a worldwide craze in 1880, with people carrying them everywhere, and employers banning them from workplaces — the original "addictive puzzle game."
With the rise of personal computers, sliding puzzles found a natural home in digital form. Sokoban (1981) introduced block-pushing mechanics. Chip's Challenge (1989) combined sliding with obstacle-course design. Each iteration added a new twist to the basic sliding mechanic.
The smartphone era brought sliding puzzles to billions of pockets. The key innovations were simplification (fewer rules, more intuitive controls) and procedural generation (infinite content). Arrow puzzle, with its single-rule, single-tap mechanic, represents the culmination of this trend: the purest possible expression of the sliding puzzle genre.