I took a crack at recreating this in javascript once the necessary APIs made their way to mobile safari - <a href="https://highphone.app" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://highphone.app</a> 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."<p>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<p>Standard Eula.
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.
I had heard of this before..<p>>Sergey [Brin] wrote an app that lets you throw phone up in the air, measure how many seconds until you catch it or it hits the floor.<p><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/2008/9/our-favorite-part-of-google-s-android-gphone-launch" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.businessinsider.com/2008/9/our-favorite-part-of-...</a>
Can anybody understand how it detects cheating (throwing your phone off a tall building)?<p>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.<p>Perhaps it can tell the difference between reaching terminal velocity and crashing into the ground, and it penalizes the former?
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.
Has someone tried this with a compressed gas powered cannon yet?<p>Edit: Also, does the app check for the sudden deceleration spike when it hits the ground so you can't, say, add some kind of parachute?
> The app was immediately banned from the App Store<p>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.