OK so still looking to hit that million dollar app I decided to turn to the "Dark Arts" and maybe cash in on the New Age style craze.  I created a couple of mystical apps.  One that gives people a past life reading and the other predicting their next life or, Afterlife.  I naively assumed that people who would buy these types of apps know they are just a bit of fun.  But from reading some of their reviews I discovered this is not always the case, but more on that in a minute.

In my last post I talked about a fake DNA detector.  Feedback on "Are We Related? - Touch and Scan DNA" indicated that people weren't happy with the randomness of results.  So this time I set out to make a past life reader and Afterlife predictor that were as "accurate" as humanly possible.    By taking in a lot of different inputs, such as name, date or birth, etc I made the app so that each person gets the same response with the same inputs, but there was a wide enough range of responses that two individuals were unlikely to get the same answer.

I had a couple of thoughts on how to create the responses.  One was to use some kind of madlibs style method that randomly pulled together different words.  But this made it difficult to go into great details and to make an interesting story.  So instead I just wrote a number of stories about people's possible past lives and tried to make them interesting.

Here's an example of someone's past life reading:

You were born in Paris in the late 1700s.  Your parents were members of the aristocracy and from all outward appearances you led a charmed life.  However little did people realise that your father was a tyrannical figure who ruled the house with an iron fist.  You were not given any of the trappings of the household wealth, forced to do manual tasks around the home in exchange for food and board.  When you didn't do as you were told you were severely beaten.  The only solace you could get was from a kindly Aunt who took you under her wing.  At the age of 15 your Aunt died leaving much of her fortune to you, receivable on your 18th birthday.  A month before your 18th birthday, however, the French Revolution began and you were put to the guillotine during the subsequent reign of terror.  This may explain why you have strong feeling of injustice.

I tried to make the stories interesting and also historically accurate.  Fact checking all my stories with wikipedia.  For the Afterlife App I just used my imagination and tried to come up with an interesting future.  Here's an example:

You will be a teleportation control officer in your next life.  With the advent of teleportation people will be able to  teleport instantaneously to any point in the world.  The implications on society of this ability is soon discovered and it is quickly realized that control officers are needed.  You will be responsible for tracking and apprehending people who use misuse teleportation for criminal or immoral purposes.

So what did my customers think of them?  Well quite a few loved them, and I got a number of 5 star ratings with comments like "It was so fun to see what i 'Was' in a past life. it made me laugh because i was in Japan and my brother is obsessed with japan, i also liked seeing the numerology and other stuff. Great app"

But again some people seemed to miss the point altogether.  Here's another review, "I don't know how accruate these 'past lives' really are, when I put in just my first name and my last name and all that then I got that I was a solider for the ottoman empire in the late 1500's, then I put in my first middle and last name and I got that I was a doctor living in England in the late 1800's who had a wife and 3 daughters one daughter who ran off with this dude I punished??? Lol....yeah not accruate but entertaining".  Surprisingly he thought by giving different inputs he'd get the same result.

The app looked promising early on.  With one day making me over $100 AUD.  But now it's lucky to make around $5 a day, lost in the sea of Apps that is known as the crappstore, umm sorry App Store.

The afterlife app didn't do as well as the past life app.  It seems people are more interested in finding out what happened in their past, perhaps with the view of using it as an excuse for their current woes, than finding out their future.

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