I've been using Electroneum's new mobile miner for Android on and off the past couple days and have made a surprising amount. So far I'm up to 9 ETN (~$.45). Most surprising is that I "mined" this currency on my mobile phone without any extra power consumption or memory use. The mobile app explains that the miner does not mine crypto in the usual way but instead awards currency for downloading and using the app.
This has been a part of Electroneum's philosophy from the start. The developers see value in the popular adoption of crypto currency and designed their mining process to award currency for using the app.
I'm using Android 8.0 and have a persistent notification that Electroneum is running in the background.
And here is the battery usage info after running about 4 hours:
The mobile miner assigns the app a theoretical hash rate that it uses to award coins. Of course, there is no way to increase this hash rate on a single mobile device.
The only times I've turned it off have been on accident. When I 'back' out if the app it closes instead of runs in the background (I have to switch apps or press home key to keep it running). There are all sorts of ways to accidentally close the app. I wish it stayed running in the background and was harder to close like more annoying apps (uTorrent), but I understand how that can be considered akin to malware.
Overall, the Electroneum mobile miner functions similar to an airdrop. It raises awareness of the currency and awards coins for little effort. It plays with interesting ideas about the value of marketing and adoption. Electroneum aims to be easy to use and thus widely used. So far so good.