I took a crack at recreating this in javascript once the necessary APIs made their way to mobile safari - https://highphone.app if interested! (iPhones only, sorry)
I've been tickled by the idea of a follow-up version, Send Me To Hell, where users instead throw their phones _downward_. High scores are awarded based on the maximum speed achieved as the phone hits the ground.
"The original idea was to have very expensive gadgets, which people in certain societies buy just to show off, and to get them to throw it."
This is phrased like some kind of shot at consumerism but isn't it an even bigger flex to buy an expensive gadget and then immediately start throwing it dangerously high in the air?
>Nonetheless, the mobile game opens with a warning that requests players to be aware of their surroundings, along with a legal disclaimer absolving the developer from any injuries or damages that may result from playing
Reminds me of one of when I made my first android app way back in the early days of android; it made the phone scream whenever it detected it was falling.
tangential: i had an idea for a custom keyboard app... it would replace your keyboard with a limited set of scrabble tiles. tiles don't leave your board (and therefore can't be entered into text boxes) unless arranged to form a scrabble-legal word. tiles are replaced with new ones after successfully used. the keyboard would keep track of your running score, and if you switch keyboards, the score resets. never got around to making it though.
This is a great idea! How would you handle backspacing (assuming the user's intent legitimately changes)?
You may need to allow "exemptions" of some kind to make it fun. If I need to use my phone for searching for a work related term, I'd like that not to impact the game. Perhaps the keyboard only activates in certain apps?
Can anybody understand how it detects cheating (throwing your phone off a tall building)?
Assuming it's just using the accelerometer to detect freefall, is there any way to distinguish ascent and descent? GPS is probably too inaccurate and too high-latency to assist here.
Perhaps it can tell the difference between reaching terminal velocity and crashing into the ground, and it penalizes the former?
Dropping a phone will result in an immediate change from normal 1g gravity to freefall. Throwing it will involve a brief spike of high-g acceleration in between.
There have been a few of those already, for at least a decade. IIRC, there was some weather app that crowdsourced readings from users with certain motorola phones and gave shockingly granular weather.
Hahahahaha I remember having an idea for an app like this during a very boring first job after college. Never actually took the time to make the thing, but I wished I had, because I remember seeing the announcement of Send Me To Heaven’s banning on The Verge and thinking it was quite funny.
There are federal regulations that prohibit operating a GPS at faster than xx mph speeds, basically to prohibit guided missiles, and this would kick in first (may even trigger an error state in the accelerometer or OS, I'm pretty sure).
The app does compare distances neg-Y and pos-Y but I don't know if it checks the rate of ascent to be within some tolerance of throwing speed. You may have found the cheat code, if you can address the speed limit.
> There are federal regulations that prohibit operating a GPS at faster than xx mph speeds, basically to prohibit guided missiles, and this would kick in first (may even trigger an error state in the accelerometer or OS, I'm pretty sure).
This app doesn't use GPS, it uses accelerometer. It is 100% legal in the US to operate a GPS while over CoCom/MTCR limits: above 1,000 knots (510 m/s) and/or at an altitude higher than 18,000 m (59,000 ft). The regulation is on the GPS manufacturer, who is required to output null/error/no GPS data if it detects it is above these limits (edit: unless they are licensed, which you can apply for if you're a defense contractor or in aerospace). It isn't like if a GPS device is traveling too high or fast, it is automatically a crime and bricks itself or alerts the authorities.
The regulation has changed and no longer limits use at altitude. Source: have launched high altitude balloons to 100000' and https://space.stackexchange.com/a/14695.
You still have to be careful to buy a GPS unit that isn't limited in altitude, though.
> There are federal regulations that prohibit operating a GPS at faster than xx mph speeds
Do you have a source? I remember catching "800km/h" by a normal trekking Garmin device through the window of a passenger plane. Quick googling revealed many such stories.
> "Cheating" by throwing a phone from a tall building typically returns an error message.[3] The app's calculations keep track of how long the phone takes to rise and fall, and an error message is displayed if the distance fallen exceeds the length of the ascent.[2]
It says it checks whether the time going up is shorter than the time going down to keep people from throwing it off a building. So I have a feeling it wouldn't work... Especially since part of their intention is for people to break expensive phones they bought only to show off while trying to show off even more.
Don't think you can calculate that based on acceleration, you are at zero g the entire time you are in flight. I suspect it's looking for the acceleration peak when you throw it up, as opposed to just dropping it from a high building.
More accurately: initial upward acceleration while under impulse, immediately followed by 9.8 m/s^2 downward acceleration the instant that it leaves your hand.
> The app was immediately banned from the App Store
This is the kind of infantilization that has kept me out of the walled garden. I no longer feel the need to be under a parent's supervision, and if I did I wouldn't pick a giant corporation for the job.
unfortunately the Google play store is not that much different.
Although the motives are clearly very different, but they tend to wave "security of users" quite a lot to justify removing basic functionality like apps accessing internal storage....
