As I walk around the city for exercise and errands, I like to play walking-around games on my phone: games that that use GPS* to move my little guy around in the game. I just wrote a new such game. It runs in a web page: Walkzee. (Because Apple hates the web, if you visit Walkzee on your iPhone and you, like 99.9% of iPhone users have the default web browser and haven't turned on the enable geolocation setting, the game will do nothing.) I'm still tweaking the game. I play it as I walk around; then sit down and fix bugs when I get home. As of today, it might be of more interest to Mystery Hunt players than walkers: there are no instructions, so half the challenge is figuring out how to play.
Why am I writing yet-another walking-around phone game? The previous such game I wrote ran on top of Google Cloud Services. You might remember a few months back, I switched my backups to not use Google servers, run by a will-abet-genocide-for-$$$ division within Google. Some days ago, I wondered: "Why is Google still billing me?" My little walking-around game didn't make Google's servers think very hard—it almost squeaked under the threshhold to run for free. But it was a little over, and thus Google was billing me.
I wrote this new game so that it does all of its thinking and data storage on the phone, not on some server elsewhere on the net. Then I shut down my old game that was running on Google's computers. Now I won't send money directly to Google's pro-genocide division. This means giving up some server-y features. In the old game, when my phone broke, my score was still saved on some Google machine; so when I got a new phone and resumed play, my big ol' score showed up. In this new game, if I get a new phone, I'll have to start all over building up my score. <sarcasm>oh no…</sarcasm>
No, I don't think this will change Google's behavior. I'm imagining some Google exec: "We were willing to toss out 'Don't be evil' to get that $$$ military contract, but Larry shut down his app and that little app pays for a cup of coffee every four months, so—uh, make that five months, I want to leave a decent tip or else the barista will spit in my drink." Yeah, no, this isn't changing anything important, aside from me being able to look myself in the mirror; well, OK, that's kinda important.
*Yes, I mean geolocation using GPS and other means.
