Once your phone battery dips below five per cent, conservation is pretty pointless — that cell is as good as dead. But a pair of app developers has decided to make the best of a hopeless situation.
Die With Me is a new messenger app available on iOS and Android. It connects strangers in a chat room setting, allowing them to meet briefly and pass the time away as their batteries empty out to zero.
But there’s a catch: The app only works on phones with a battery charge of five per cent or less.
Niche: A new messenger app, called Die With Me, only allows you to speak with people when your phone has five per cent battery or less
Meet someone new! The app also allows you to connect with total strangers who are also facing the same predicament with their phone batteries
Die With Me was launched last Wednesday by Dries Depoorter, a Belgian artist, and David Surprenant, a Montreal-based interactive developer.
‘We wanted to do something positive with a low battery,’ Depoorter told Motherboard.
The 99-cent app only functions when a user’s battery is at five per cent or lower. Then, he or she can choose a nickname and enter a chat room to talk to other low-battery sufferers.
According to a brave Motherboard reporter who drained her battery to test it out, the chats are mostly filled with people complaining about their low batteries and saying goodbye.
The idea came to Depoorter in 2016 when he was traveling for work.
‘I was in a city that I didn’t know on my way back to the hotel, and my phone battery was low,’ he told Digital Trends. ‘I was really stressed about this as it was already turning to night. At that moment, I had the idea for an app that you can only use when you have low battery.’
Good intention: One of the apps creators, Dries Depoorter, said that the idea came out of wanting to do something ‘positive’ with a nearly-dead battery
Working together with Surprenant, the pair tested a beta version in November of last year.
They were ready to go live on the Apple Store when a stroke of bad luck hit: News broke that Apple was intentionally slowing down performance on older models of its phone in what they admitted was a move to save battery life.
The Die With Me app was repeatedly rejected by Apple, which may have been looking to minimize and discussion of poorly-performing batteries.
Eventually, the app was approved, and is available on both iOS and Android dividends. Though it’s currently just a fun game, Depoorter is floating the possibility of making a dating app version that would encourage romance-seekers to get off their phones.
‘We had ideas to make a dating app where you can find someone around you with a low battery, and when you meet, the battery [is dead], so you can have a offline real conversation,’ he told Motherboard.