'Die With Me' Is a Chat App Exclusively for People Whose Phones Are About to Die

Never die alone again.

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There’s a sense of panic that sets in when one realizes that their phone is about to die. Sometimes it’s an isolating experience, as everyone around you happily sits at 20 to 99 percent battery, while your phone slowly withers. But thanks to a new, totally unnecessary but nevertheless darkly comical app, you and your phone will never have to die alone again.

The app is called “Die With Me,” and it’s only accessible to use when a phone has less than 5 percent juice left. As Digital Trends explains, the app is a chat room full of other sorry schmucks who are waiting for their smartphone to die. In the chatroom you can say goodbye not to your loved ones or that friend you were texting, but to total strangers who are also anxiously waiting to be disconnected from the digital realm. Whenever a user’s phone dies, a message in the chatroom pops up with their name followed by the phrase “HAS DIED.”

“I have to travel a lot to speak about my work at all sort of conferences,” Die With Me co-creator Dries Depoorter told Digital Trends. “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 low battery. But I didn’t know how it would work until we came up with the idea of making it a public chat room.”

The app seems to provide a sense of solidarity during the universal, daunting experience of watching a phone die when it's needed most. Depoorter says the app has already captured half a million messages, and there is an average of eight users on at any time. Once your phone dies though, there’s nothing that Die With Me, or anyone for that matter can do to quiet the existential dread that accompanies a dead, black screen.

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