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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
