Here's the Most Idiotic and Brilliant App Ever

Ok, the app&#x27;s web service is rather prone to manipulation:<p>You just need to HTTP GET the following URL:<p><pre><code> http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.carrotpop.com&#x2F;smth&#x2F;php&#x2F;save_result.php?id=&lt;UID&gt;&amp;nickname=&lt;NICK&gt;&amp;country=&amp;result=&lt;HEIGHT&gt;&amp;latitude=0&amp;longitude=0 </code></pre> * UID looks like an autoincrement ID<p>* NICK is what you entered for the highscore<p>* HEIGHT is the float value of the height in meters, i.e. &quot;1.23&quot;<p>In the HTTP response, you get a data structure (not sure which encoding it is, but it is straightforward) of the highscore data:<p><pre><code> [[[&quot;1.&quot;,&quot;LIATO&quot;,&quot;44.19m&quot;],[&quot;2.&quot;,&quot;ROYBOY_91&quot;,&quot;43.16m&quot;],[&quot;3.&quot;,&quot;YAIR40&quot;,&quot;35.12m&quot;],[&quot;4.&quot;,&quot;GABRIEL&quot;,&quot;34.70m&quot;],[&quot;5.&quot;,&quot;KAI&quot;,&quot;31.10m&quot;],[&quot;6.&quot;,&quot;KAFAC99&quot;,&quot;21.06m&quot;],[&quot;7.&quot;,&quot;JOSH&quot;,&quot;20.37m&quot;],[&quot;8.&quot;,&quot;KEANSKI&quot;,&quot;17.61m&quot;],[&quot;9.&quot;,&quot;EKREM6363&quot;,&quot;16.10m&quot;],[&quot;10.&quot;,&quot;LORENZO&quot;,&quot;12.24m&quot;],[&quot;2047.&quot;,&quot;MY BEST TRY&quot;,&quot;0.71m&quot;],], ... </code></pre> <i></i>Edit:<i></i> just opening the URL <a href="http://www.carrotpop.com/smth/php/save_result.php" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.carrotpop.com&#x2F;smth&#x2F;php&#x2F;save_result.php</a> you can see the current stats, encoded as above.

It really bothers me that Apple banned an app like this. Just allow people to be idiotic. There&#x27;s even a <i>disclaimer</i> after all...<p>As for the app itself, cool! I&#x27;m glad somebody had the audacity to ship something as outrageous as this. I don&#x27;t think it will get much of a following, but I suppose if you <i>really</i> don&#x27;t care about your phone or you&#x27;re <i>really</i> confident in catching this could be a cool, reckless waste of 10 minutes.<p>EDIT: For clarification, I don&#x27;t really side with or against Apple in general on things, so this isn&#x27;t meant to be a &quot;Apple&#x27;s always a walled garden, BAH&quot; post, etc...I just really feel any company should let users feel free to destroy hardware. But I understand that might not be the best philosophy to run a multinational company.<p>EDIT2: Just thought of a way to game this after reading another comment - slap on a Lifeproof case, go in a big pool shallow enough to stand, throw it really high. Eliminates the need to catch it (within...reason...).

Actually, Sergey Brin made the same app and showed it at the Android G1 launch :)<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWwLZfVpCyU" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=VWwLZfVpCyU</a>

I hope they have a standing connection to the server during the throw and detect ... disconnects. That way, they could detect crashes and give approximate credit for the height.<p>I don&#x27;t want to throw my phone high into the air, watch it go to pieces and not even get a high score.

Pah. That&#x27;s nothing. I have an app idea called &#x27;iSkip&#x27;, where you skim your phone over the water and your phone sends back how many hops it did as it&#x27;s last act.

I wonder how smart &quot;throw&quot; detection is. Could I strap it to a two-stage model rocket with a couple of D class motors? Or are you limited to a single impulse event, in which case I&#x27;ve got a couple unfired air bags kicking around.<p>There&#x27;s a phone recycling bin here at school; I&#x27;m tempted to grab a few old android phones and see if I can get one working well enough to try it out.

It requires GPS. Crashes on my tablet.<p>Also, see their Facebook. They publicly post GPS location of winners, together with StreetView. Is that stated in the app? It can be a privacy concern.<p><pre><code> com.carrotpop.www.smth E&#x2F;AndroidRuntime: FATAL EXCEPTION: main java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: requested provider gps doesn&#x27;t exisit at android.os.Parcel.readException(Parcel.java:1429) at android.os.Parcel.readException(Parcel.java:1379) at android.location.ILocationManager$Stub$Proxy.requestLocationUpdates(ILocationManager.java:646) at android.location.LocationManager._requestLocationUpdates(LocationManager.java:660) at android.location.LocationManager.requestLocationUpdates(LocationManager.java:482) at com.ansca.corona.CoronaSensorManager$1.run(CoronaSensorManager.java:163) at android.os.Handler.handleCallback(Handler.java:615) at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:92) at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:137) at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:4745) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invokeNative(Native Method) at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Method.java:511) at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:786) at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:553) at dalvik.system.NativeStart.main(Native Method)</code></pre>

There&#x27;s a company in Austin called Mutual Mobile that got its start in 2009 with a similar app called Hangtime: <a href="http://www.texastechpulse.com/interview_with_john_arrow,_mutual_mobile/s-0029015.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.texastechpulse.com&#x2F;interview_with_john_arrow,_mut...</a> They&#x27;re now 300+ people and build mobile apps for enterprise clients.<p>So...CarrotPop is off to a good start I guess.

I remember working on a similar, though slightly less destructive, app. I had a first or second generation iPod touch and it&#x27;s back was curved so that you could spin it on a flat surface. I collected lots of accelerometer data and wrote the algorithm to figure out how long and fast the device had been spinning. Unfortunately, the next generation of devices came out with a flat back so I shelved the idea.

For the iOS crowd: here is a similar game my friends and I built at a Hackathon last week with Node and Socket.io that you can play from mobile Safari: <a href="http://phonesma.sh/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;phonesma.sh&#x2F;</a><p>Visit it on your browser to get started, then on your iPhone to play (App is not tuned for Android accelerometer data yet).

Might actually be a good benchmarking app for makers of rugged phones

Wow, amazing! I wish I had thought of this.<p>Think of it as the heart of a 2-part high-school physics project:<p>1. Develop a rocket that will carry your smartphone as its payload.<p>2. Develop a case that will allow your smartphone to survive the landing.<p>...and a 2-part college project:<p>3. Find investors for your high school project, then market it.<p>4. Profit!

As someone who compulsively throws things in the air when bored, this sounds amazing.

We did a team-building activity a few years ago that included creating catapults and launching water balls 50-100 feet. One group made a trebuchet-style device that threw the payload so consistently that the team members could catch the payload. One team member decided he wanted to video it, and had the team launch his smartphone. He caught it, but then dropped it to the grass-covered ground.<p>I imagine the strong horizontal acceleration and in-flight rotation of the phone may &quot;throw off&quot; (heh) the height calculation, but it likely would have earned an impressive score.

Look at this app: <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.nichtlustig.android&amp;hl=en" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=de.nichtlustig...</a> It shows comics from the German nichtlustig.de In the appstore you can see some screenshots, also of the included 4 panel instructions: It visualizes the 4 operations to be done with the app: forward&#x2F;backward, mark as favourite, random cartoon and destruction.<p>When I saw it I laughed for a long time :-)

For all those sad iPhone users out there who really want to break their phone, I threw together <a href="http://jsfiddle.net/2Kxzv/2/show/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jsfiddle.net&#x2F;2Kxzv&#x2F;2&#x2F;show&#x2F;</a>. The interface is primitive, and all it tells you is the time that the phone was in the air (and possibly not even that, if the phone spins at all).<p>My high score is 604, and I think I want to stop playing this game.

The current high score is 43.16m - I wonder if somebody found a way to cheat, or if they really really do not care about the wellbeing of their smartphone.

I&#x27;m curious why this was banned from iTunes. Does anyone know if this is against a specific rule, or if it was a subjective decision?

Business idea!<p>Put together a baseball with an accelerometer, a small digital display and maybe bluetooth as well.<p>Sell it to schools and individual athletes as a training device. You pitch and it tells you what the speed of the last pitch was. Connect it up to a computer and it will give you a graph of the velocity over time, allow you to track improvements in pitching and track users.<p>Or does such a thing already exist?

So a friend of mine interned at this small company nearly 3 years ago, and made this app over his summer: <a href="http://iphonehangtime.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;iphonehangtime.com</a> On my mobile device so couldn&#x27;t really look through the comments to see if someone already mentioned hang time, but I&#x27;ll just leave it here.

It should stream data via a socket realtime to a server somewhere. Then when your phone breaks, at least you get a new record.

A simpler and safer version of this would be something where you spin your phone and catch it right-side-up. Scoring could be done by counting the number of times this was done successfully in a row without catching it the wrong way or dropping it, or double-triple spins etc. I do this for fun all the time. So far, no drops on concrete.

Randall Munroe published some relevant calculations recently on the ability of humans to throw things high:<p><a href="http://what-if.xkcd.com/44/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;what-if.xkcd.com&#x2F;44&#x2F;</a><p>Summary: a professional baseball pitcher might be able to reach fifty metres but the human arm is optimised for throwing horizontally.

I wonder how this app works: Obviously it must transmit the highscore quickly enough before the phone shatters. I hope it opens and warms up a connection before you throw it. Maybe it can constantly transmit the height and falling time&#x2F;speed up until the last second of life of the phone

The Kinect has an accelerometer (to help it sense tilt, and find the floor normal).<p>I wanted a gaming achievement: &quot;30 seconds in free fall&quot;. With a follow-up five minutes. The first one you might get using the Vomit Comet. The second probably requires significantly more expenditure.

I&#x27;ve been playing the awesome DropPhone app since 2012! <a href="https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ungulation.dropphone" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;play.google.com&#x2F;store&#x2F;apps&#x2F;details?id=com.ungulation...</a>

Won&#x27;t take long until someone takes that thing skydiving to get the world record. :-)

This app should sell a kit with a parachute...This would be the new Toy Parachute Men.

Well, looking at the &quot;World top 10&quot; high scores (on app), the top one has a record of 43.16m. I cannot imagine why someone would threw a cellphone to this far.<p>I wonder if there is a way to &quot;hack&quot; the accelerometer...

Turn the app on, wrap the phone in bubblewrap&#x2F;foam.. Clean,Safe,Fun

I remember a piece of advice for taking original photos is to set the timer then throw it in the air. I would love to try it but no one will let me borrow their camera.

How about an app which awards points based on g-force while driving a car? You could get bonuses for complete flips, &#x27;hard stops&#x27; etc.

How does this app make money? And why is it getting so much attention now even though the same idea&#x27;s been done before?

People are playing crazier&#x2F;riskier games everyday! I mean why not ...

Is the Galaxy Tab version available? That could get dangerous.

Is SMTH available for Google TV?

Been done: <a href="http://maemo.org/packages/view/n900fly/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;maemo.org&#x2F;packages&#x2F;view&#x2F;n900fly&#x2F;</a>

Idiotic because you might destroy your phone?<p>Or idiotic because the energy spent on this could have been used to build something that actually provided value?