The existential chatroom app you can only use when your phone is dying

On a good day, my phone battery never drops below 35 percent. A dead phone is a useless one, and the spike of anxiety that accompanies that fear is enough to send me scurrying for the nearest outlet. But when my charger is home in bed, and I’m out at a bar, there’s nothing I can do but embrace the inevitable: my battery is on its way to its own funeral. At the very least, I’ve found a conversation app that turns that feeling of desperation into anticipation. Welcome to Die With Me, the chatroom app you can only use when your phone is about to die.

If your battery has anything higher than a 5 percent charge, Die With Me won’t open up its doors; once you are in, if you charge up to higher than 5 percent, it will automatically kick you out of the room. It’s a place to bond, for a fleeting moment, with strangers sharing the same near-death phone experience, one with a built-in countdown timer on your conversations: what will you say in the moments before your screen goes black? At a time when big social media feels like a never-ending wash of bad news and toxicity, Die With Me is a small, safe haven that offers evanescent human connection as the reward for a dying device.

Artist Dries Depoorter and developer David Surprenant were inspired by the experience of getting lost in a city because of a dead battery. “I think everyone with a smartphone [has experienced] this sort of situation once,” he tells The Verge via email. “As a digital artist, I really wanted to do something with this feeling.” Die With Me resembles a straightforward ‘90s chatroom where everyone is prompted to enter a username and then dropped into a single room. As your companions’ batteries drain, their remaining percentage is displayed next to their name — a countdown that inevitably ends with their phones going dead and logging off.

Depoorter and Surprenant consider the app more of an art project than a game or social platform. The duo plans to release a book later down the road featuring the room’s conversations, which span anything from urgent descriptions of their low-battery predicaments to tongue-in-cheek guessing games where the prize is a fictional charger. “You can share the same feeling with other people,” Depoorter says. “It’s a feeling that our generation understands. The feeling of being dependent on technology.”

Die With Me provides both a fleeting sense of exclusivity and a reason to look forward to a low percentage. It’s a club you can only temporarily join, a secret room that vanishes when your time is up. Depoorter didn’t provide numbers on how many people have downloaded the service, but he says there is an average of five people in chat at any given time. It offers a combination of pleasant anonymity and random chance reminiscent of early internet chat rooms, where people popped in and out as they pleased.

The small community of anxious souls using the app is part of what makes the experience so special. When my phone finally dipped into the red and I logged on, I found tiny pockets of people talking about pop culture, or sharing where they were from — California, Colorado, even the UK. “A/s/l?” quipped one user, a phrase I haven’t seen since the last time the door slammed on my AIM account.

“People are chatting very fast ... they don’t have the time to think a lot about what they are saying because they feel stressed,” Depoorter says. “People ask each other where they live, what kind of music that they like but sometimes it’s also very poetic. We already saw conversations explaining what they feel when their phone is going to die. Or people share stories to each other about situations when they had a dying phone.”

There’s a frantic, ephemeral, feeling to the entire experience. As our percentages dropped lower, people said their last goodbyes before they inevitably poofed into the tech-free void. Only their messages remained. As my phone sputtered on 1 percent, my last text went unsent; my rush to hit send was instead greeted with a black screen. My worry about a dead phone was replaced with a twinge of sadness I’d never get to say goodbye.