Chat app for use when your battery is less than 5% | Hacker News Reader

Chat app for use when your battery is less than 5%

diewithme.online

129 pointssalgernon59 comments

Aw, I thought it would be some experimental Super Low Power Chat thing.

Yep. I'm surprised phone companies don't do this. Like a console based chat that only needs the kernel when the 'nominal' battery has run out.

I always thought a recovery image that could send and receive calls and sms would be awesome. No internet, not even 2g. Just phone and sms. Maybe some contacts (name / number tuple) that'd exist separate from the main systems contacts.

Having had my "Phone" crash due to software glitches, leaving me unable to dial 911, I 100% agree this would be a great boot-time switch.

I have this on my Android phone, it's called "Ultra STAMINA mode". Only GSM calls are allowed, no WLan, no data, selected apps only and a limited user interface. Did somebody measure the lifetime it adds to a phone with 5% battery left ?

I'd love to know if this had problems getting through Apple's App Store review because they couldn't use it during testing.

I'm sure testers can set whatever battery level is desired.

"Set" the level of a battery?

Set the threshold that will enable the app.

Yes, in the emulator.

It's not an app that I'd use often enough to be worth the space on my phone, but I love the concept.

The apk is a paltry 18 MB. Hardly enough space to think about on most phones.

I feel this is what is wrong with software today, this app could have been much less than 1MB.

It would be hard to justify putting more than a few hours into getting it down to 1 MB.

10k users, each saving 17MB = 170GB total savings.

A 64GB iPhone 8 costs £699, and a 256GB iPhone 8 costs £849. That puts the cost of phone storage very roughly at £0.78/GB, so the 170GB space reduction saves the users £132 collectively. I pulled these numbers out of thin air for the most part, but you get the point.

It also improves user retention. Many people are running out of storage space, and routinely have to delete apps to free up space. An 18MB app will surely be deleted before a 1MB app.

So you're 'saving' each customer £.01 and to frame it another way that 64 GB iPhone has ~55-60GB usable space which is 3000 17MB apps. Sure a smaller app is laudable and devs have gotten loose with optimizing for space but the numbers just don't really make sense for a single dev on a kind of jokey app with a low lifespan to spend the time on.

A 18MB app is smaller than the vast majority of apps nowadays.

Which is rather disappointing, considering the amount of space on phones hasn't increased much. Back in 2010 when 1 MB was a normal app size, a decent phone had 32 to 64 gb of storage. Now apps are twenty times as big, and a decent phone might have 64 to 128 gb. It's not scaling in sync.

Apps have never really been the main space hog on phones though if you look at the numbers. Average app size is only ~40 MB and (the numbers are a bit sketchier here) the average person has 30-50 apps on their phone so even if we go to an extreme with multiple times the average apps you've only taken up 10-15% of a phones storage with apps.

Anecdotally the main perpetrator for wasted space is content; videos, pictures, and (in my case at 29GB) podcasts.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-apps-does-the-average-iPhone-...

How much is the author's time worth? How many hours would it take to get the application down to 1MB?

For an application that relies on many simultaneous users, it's better to be a large cheap app then an expensive optimized app.

Saving £132 across 10k users does not sound worth the slightest amount of effort.

Especially when there is no one entity saving all that money.

Those numbers only work if all users are constantly filling up the entirety of their phone's storage. Most people don't, and don't care about saving 17MB on their phone.

As someone introduced to computing in the 80s, I agree that code sizes are often insane based on what the apps actually do, but in the end, it's cheaper to just not care than to go through the effort to unnecessarily optimize.

you can buy a 200GB microSD card for ~$70 or $0.35/GB ...

There's quite a few flagship tier phones out there that sadly don't take microSD cards; Google Pixel/Nexus hasn't for a long time and neither has iPhone.

I buy the cheap phones, they have more useful features. (although Google tries really hard to disable microSD card slots via software...)

If you use a phone without a super hi-res screen it will be much smaller.

18MB is the range for React Native apps. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this is one of those.

> The apk is a paltry 18 MB.

It's somewhat disturbing that this is considered paltry.

Most DOS games managed to fit into a single diskette, and that includes not only the logic bits, but also assets: images, music, sound, etc. Remember that they didn't have the benefit of being able to borrow a massive number of assets and libraries from the OS. You wanted a button? You had to draw it yourself.

Also, my Linux kernel - which is infinitely more complex than this app - weights in at 7MB. Ok, sure, the modules are another 30MB, but that's only because I took the shotgun approach when I configured my kernel. I'm lazy, sue me.

Anyway, this app seems absolutely trivial and it barely has any assets at all. It's frankly embarrassing that it consumes so many resources for such little functionality.

> I'm lazy, sue me.

I think the developer was "lazy" too which is why he didn't spend days and weeks rewriting the wheel instead of using react.

As far as floppies, I think that's why we don't use them anymore.

Writing a native app isn't much harder than using React though.

You don't realize how close to the line I am in terms of storage space.

Hilarious. You could even chat for as long as you wanted by plugging in a charger at 2% and taking it out at 4%.

Wonder if it boots you out if battery increases after you open it. “Sorry get your power out of here!”

Reminds me of the character Marla Singer (or even the narrator) in Fight Club, who, though healthy, goes to cancer support groups for... reasons.

Seems disrespectful in a way :)

With crap entry-level Android phones, you could just play music or use navigation in the background while you run it off a charger and it'll never go above 2% even while it's plugged in :)

I remember when Pokemon Go was the rage, a friends OnePlus would need to be plugged in to a battery bank the entire time, even then it still drained slowly.

That's a fault of the charger you're using, the phone has nothing to do with it.

No, it's not. It's a Qualcomm QuickCharge 3.0 capable charger that exceeds all charge requirements and has no problem with other devices.

Then maybe I misunderstood what you mean by entry level. Or maybe you own a model that is an exception. I deal with cheap (sub $200) chinese android phones a lot because we do development in React Native but it still has to run smoothly on these things, and I've never encountered these issues with phones newer than 2015.

Clearly this needs to be tiered,

90%+ battery: losers, cowards, amateurs

50-90% battery: casual, basic

10-50% battery: mlg, nerds

5-10% battery: outcasts, dangerous

5%- battery: heretics, supplicants

Isn't this promoting bad charging practices since modern lithium ion batteries function best when charged early and often? My understanding is that the extremely low charge of the battery reduces the longevity of a battery's health. The confusing part is the older battery technology nickel-cadmium had the exact opposite recommendation of charging only after the battery was completely discharged.

I love the "Hooli" network operator name in the screenshot, a nice touch.

Where's the source code?

Looks like it's closed source .. and $1. .. I mean .. I've paid more for art.

I don't get why this is $0.99 on the app store...

Tried checking the urls found in the Android store description, and one didn't resolve while another took me to a simple page bearing the name of the owner that contained a email link. Not really sure what to think.

Edit:

Ah, checked out what this IDFA Doclab was. And it seems to be some kind of experimental documentary project. So frankly this whole app reeks of being "performance art".

It's cute—what's the goal in creating it?

https://www.doclab.org/2018/die-with-me-by-dries-depoorter-d...

It’s interactive art!

But my iPhone6 usually died at 30%! ... :(

Love the domain. But the page isnt loading.

Server was at 3% battery when I loaded it... maybe it died?

Loaded just fine for me. You using a JS blocker or something maybe?

Server only runs on iPhones with < 5% battery.

Costs $1 when the same can be accomplished with a native web app. Seems like a quick cash grab rather than "art" or anything.

What is so bad about supporting someone with 1 dollar? It's not that much...

Native web app is an oxymoron.

You read the word WebAssembly somewhere didn't you.

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