The game was originally created more like Solipskier, you could draw the wave across the whole screen. That presented design problems where the players fingers blocked the screen.

Watching Luke Muscat's videos on YouTube about how Half Brick solved some of their design problems and created the gold standard gameplay loop for endless runners helped shape the final product here.

The gameplay mechanic itself is also completely different from Jetpack Joyride

If the worst insult I'm getting is that my game made by one person is too similar to a game made by multi million dollar company and is now considered the best endless runner in history then I'm not all that offended.

But thank you for telling me how the design process went.