Easy enough to turn it off if you need to before getting back to 80%, though in my experience that scenario rarely comes up. (I do, on the other hand, often find myself turning it on before my battery is low enough to automatically suggest it to me, when thinking ahead about how long until I'd be able to charge.)
From the article: "The ride-hailing service is alerted when a customer's phone battery is running low because the app switches into power-saving mode."
It rather depends on why they are hogging the battery.
Example #1, since it's an "app" you can't remove but that many (I'd guess not far away from most?) people use, is Mail. I wish my email servers would send push notifications, but they don't, so Mail is constantly checking for updates. That uses battery, but it's something I want it using battery for. And then in battery saver mode, it stops automatically checking, so you won't notice any new emails until you either turn off the mode, or go into Mail and manually have it sync.
If there isn't a setting to block apps from querying your battery status, I would hope both Google and Apple provide a way to allow the user to optionally disable this soon.
Because someone thought apps (web or otherwise) having access to battery status information would, in the usual language, "allow us to improve the user experience", and that feature was added. It's the same justification as for GPS location, except in this case those who opposed did not notice that someone could use battery status for exploiting and profiling users too.
You see, this is what we're talking about with free software. When there's something good (using power supply information to avoid draining a critical battery for a user) that we would like to enable, we can enable it.
When the software is adversarial, we can't have nice things.
When the software is adversarial, we can't have nice things.
Sadly, yes. On low battery, Uber's app could change its attract screen (the map with the fake moving cars) to a static, dim screen with just the Uber logo. But no, they have to phone home to Uber Central.
At least they don't crank up the GPU to run the battery down further, then announce surge pricing. Yet.
