Researchers from the Netherlands are working on a communications app so resilient that it can survive communications and power outages, natural disasters, and can self-replicate, mutate and spread virally between clusters of mobile phones, eventually across all mobile OSes.

The app replicates within the Android OS at the moment, though future work is anticipated to enable it to spread as easily between iOS and Windows phones, since it does not require root access in order to reproduce, and is not intended to be spread via stores such as Google Play or other centralised app repositories. The act of transmission can involve a complete change of identity when communicated between Android devices via Android Beam or side-loading. During the process of replication the app, effectively a polymorphic computer virus in terms of social behaviour, may transform from a game to a calculator.

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Gee, all that and more for saying “have a nice day”.

A changing program like that could make a good game.