When it comes to chatting app, we have a lot of options available to connect us with friends and strangers. The competition in the market is so tough when it comes to these apps that in order to even get noticed, developers need to bring in something new and exciting. The developers of the app “Die With Me” certainly came up with a nice idea for their chatting app.
Die with me allows strangers with their battery under 5% to log in to a chatroom and talk to strangers while their handsets drain out of battery completely. The developers poetically put it as “die together in a chatroom on your way to offline peace.” To use die with me, you only need to create a username and allow the app to read your battery status. The main idea behind the app was to change the frustrating experience of a low battery in the phone into a positive one.
The app’s co-developer Dries Depoorter said, “I have to travel a lot to speak about my work at all sort of conferences. I was in a city that I didn’t know on my way back to the hotel, and my phone battery was low. 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 a low battery. But I didn’t know how it would work until we came up with the idea of making it a public chatroom.”
He said, “We wanted to do something positive with a low battery. Now we see people happy with a low battery, having low-battery conversations.”
The beta version of the app was showcased at the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam last year by the developers David Surprenant from Canada and Dries Depoorter from Belgium. The idea of the app was welcomed at that time but later they had to spend a lot of time to make Die With Me available on the Apple store.
Depoorter talked about this issue saying, “We had many phone calls with Apple about the app. For Android, it was really simple; they don’t have a difficult review process. But Apple was different. We think the iOS App Store is really killing creativity, and we know a lot of artists that have had similar problems.”
As soon as they were allowed in the Apple store, the app reached to number 15 in the App Store’s Entertainment category. According to Depoorter, the app has recorded almost half a million messages in conversations worldwide. The chatroom had an average of eight room available at any given time. He said that he and Surprenant will release a book with a selected messages recorded by the app sometime in future.
