Phone Hang-up App

 Introduction

I got my inspiration from the "crack slam" reference in Futurama: The Beast with a Billion Backs, where Hermes hangs the phone "in the rudest way possible."

It occurred to me that one could make a "wrapper" app that goes around the built-in phone app that would add the feature that when one hangs up the app would play a "hang-up" sound before actually ending the call.

This means that one's caller could hear something like the sound of a heavy Bakelite headset being slammed back into the cradle followed by a dial tone and then the call cuts out. Or it could be anything else, including just a "Good-bye" message.

This is for fun, but it's also more polite since it sends a clear message to the callee that the caller has deliberately ended the call, as opposed to it just having cut by accident or loss of cell service.

The app could have any number of other features as well, apart from the novelty factor.

Safety and Personal Protection Features

It occurs to me that such an app could even include safety features, for example, for women walking home at night, such as a "dead man's switch" that when released would automatically (probably with a 2-3 second delay to avoid unintended calls) drop a pin and call the police, silently and without the phone user having to do anything, possibly also turning the phone's volume up to maximum and putting out a high-pitched alarm and a call for help message, e.g., "the police have been called," and/or "Help! I'm being attacked!" It could also go into speaker mode when the police pick up, so the victim could speak to the police on the line and the attacker would be able to hear it. In other words, the woman could activate the safety system, which would flash the screen for a few second's delay, giving her a chance to put her finger on the screen or grip the buttons such that when released the alarm would be triggered.

It could also do a host of other things such as send one or more texts to the police (if they can accept them) and friends or other responders, automatically overriding "notifications off" states in addition to placing automatic silent emergency calls.

If the app takes off, it could potentially become normal for potential attackers to automatically suspect that their potential victims are holding a dead man's switch on their phone which will automatically call the police and set off an alarm. They might then learn to defeat some of these features, however, which is a good reason to make the safety features highly configurable.

Possible Features

The app would have access to the user's phone list, so setting up a call would work the same as the "raw phone app."

The app could have pre-sets for some or all (with a default) of the people the user phones on the regular, so some callees could have their own hangup sounds which would happen automatically.

The user would have a short menu (visual) on the app so they could choose the hang-up sound they want at the time they are ready to hang up, e.g., the regular Bakelite hang-up could be the default (gentle plastic rattle followed by brief dial tone followed by click), but they could choose a different one, such as the "crack slam" (fart noise followed by loud, rattling slam of Bakelite on Bakelite, followed by dial tone and click sound).

Hang-up sounds could be downloaded and configured, and custom ones made. There could even be a hang-up sound server where users could share their favorite tones, including uploading their own. Users could even be rewarded somehow for uploading popular tones (of their own making...?).

Since it's a wrapper, the app could also play some custom sounds before the call begins (or rather, once the call starts but before the user begins speaking), e.g., a greeting such as a "secretary's voice" that announces that "Joe Blogs is calling" or a fanfare or whatever.

If the app were to be set up to receive calls, (which could be problematic--see below), it could have an "electronic butler" feature, such that certain (familiar) callers could get a custom reply like "I'm in a meeting" or "I'm with my girlfriend/boyfriend" or "We're at dinner" or "I'm in a movie" or perhaps better, the user could select such messages from a menu when the call is received. In other words, before the call is actually answered (by the app), it could check who's calling, let the user know, even play them a "This is Vandelay Industries, hold please" before the user picks up, and the user has the option of sending a canned message of "I'm sorry, Mr. Blogs is unavailable, please call again later" or "Sorry, I'm in a meeting can you call back later?" This would be like the feature of sending a text to the caller immediately, but in voice form.

The app could also actually play the sounds of the starting sounds and the hang-up sound, as well as anything the callee says while this is going on, since these would all be available to the app while it is running.

As suggested in the safety feature side of things, the app could bundle things like calling and text messaging and emailing. This is kind of a vague idea, but say, somehow, if a caller failed to get somebody on the phone, the app could ask if they wanted to send a text or an email or both, as an immediately follow-up to the call. This could even pull in the phone voice recognition features, like Siri, and supply things like default subjects for emails, such as "I tried to call you" and be asked "change it or leave it?" and so forth.

On the sleezy marketing side of things, the phone could play an ad to the caller after (even before) the call. It would in principle have to be a very brief tag line, such as "Shop at Target" or "New shows on Netflix" or "Vote for Joe Blogs" or such. Still, these could be very valuable spots for advertisers. Presumably one would not play such tag lines to the callee, but this is not impossible either (and might result in actual payouts to the users, and there might be a way to configure no-ads towards certain callees or classes of callees, and so on and so on--the possibilities are endless). This sort of thing would, if done at all, be introduced after the app begins to be accepted, and one would offer a no-ads version for a premium--something like that.

There are a number of other features I've thought of and will try to remember later.

Possible Issues to Avoid 

As mentioned above, allowing ads to go into tones or hang-up sounds or such which are played to the callee might be a big problem, probably to be avoided altogether.

One thing one should be cautious about is giving off any hint of doing a sleezy "Facebook Snatch" move of harvesting the users' phone lists in any way, which would be possible since the app would be connected to the Internet for downloads and would have full access to the users' phone list.

One issue is how the app would work with incoming calls. It should be possible to create an app that when invoked wraps the phone app, sending sounds before and after actually placing the call, but an app that could also receive calls and allow for custom hang-ups, i.e., one that replaces the built-in phone app in terms of catching the incoming call, is not guaranteed to be easy, and in fact might compromise the phone's functionality. That is, if there were some issue with the hang-up app, the user would always be free to use the default ap to place calls, but if the app catches all incoming calls, i.e., the phone's ability to receive calls could be compromised by any issues with the app, which could result in, at the very least, user complaints and reluctance to install the app.

Sample Graphics

I will try to make some phone screen-shots included a few GIFs of what the screen might look like in "safety mode." The phone might flash red for a few seconds when the safety switch is activated to give the user time to put her finger/palm/hand on the screen or squeeze the right button or buttons, such that the Dead man's switch will then be activated.

The app would look like a regular phone app, with some extra buttons and sliders, and a way to get to a menu to configure the phone. 

Configurations would be a wrapper interface to the user's phone list, so as to be able to choose a default custom hang-up sound for each desired callee.

There would be a hang-up sound manager, able to determine which hang-up sounds will be available on the short list (a set of buttons to press when the call is active), upload and delete hangup sounds, and load new ones from files or from the sound recorder app on the phone.

Conclusion & Summary

The hang-up app would be a fun novelty app, but it would also have a lot of redeeming social value in terms of ending a phone call in a way that the callee knows for sure that a hang-up has occurred. Most of the app's features would come from the default phone app--it would just be a wrapper that adds sounds after the call and possibly before.

Since it's a wrapper, the app could also add features such as automatic emergency calling using a dead man's switch and so forth.

It might be impractical to make the app receive calls since this could compromise the phone, which wrapping outgoing calls would not. This could open up a lot of opportunities for incoming call management, however.

There may be, funnily enough, a lot of opportunities to sell advertising through this app.