A new iPhone app seeks to satisfy the morbid curiosity of its customers.
"Deadline" by Gist LLC predicts the user's date of death, and provides a countdown clock displaying the number of years, months, hours, and seconds until the scheduled grim reaper visit.
"Deadline uses statistical information to attempt to determine your date of expiration, but no app can really accurately determine when you will die, so consider this a way to motivate yourself to be healthier, and consult a physician as necessary," the description reads.
The app is 99 cents in the iTunes store, requires iOS 8, and is rated for persons 12 and up.
Apple's new health platform, HealthKit, provides blood pressure, weight, and activity level information to Deadline, with its user's permission. Deadline also asks for one's height, sex, birthday, and sleep quality. As the biometric information is updated by Healthkit, Deadline continually adjusts the date of death.
The app then asks how often the user smokes, drinks, drives in cars, and feels stressed. The result is a prediction of how long a person will live, and a countdown, lest one forget the exact date of death. Many viewed the app in a light-hearted, and even helpful, way.
"This app is fun and a reminder that the choices you make now while you're young will greatly effect [sic] you when you're older," one person wrote in a customer review.
Some were less thrilled with the idea of a death predictor, however.
"I'm 74 and I do not want to hear I will live to 77!" a Yahoo commenter lamented. "I am not perfectly fine with that."
Still others took issue with the amount of personal information being collected by the apps.
"Just remember that every nugget of information you enter into those aps is being mined for that information and will probably be used against you some day," one commenter warned.
A few people also pointed out that in the life insurance industry, death prediction is called "underwriting."
