[blevinstein]

Can anybody understand how it detects cheating (throwing your phone off a tall building)?

Assuming it's just using the accelerometer to detect freefall, is there any way to distinguish ascent and descent? GPS is probably too inaccurate and too high-latency to assist here.

Perhaps it can tell the difference between reaching terminal velocity and crashing into the ground, and it penalizes the former?

[HALtheWise]

Dropping a phone will result in an immediate change from normal 1g gravity to freefall. Throwing it will involve a brief spike of high-g acceleration in between.

[MrDresden]

First guess would be that there isn't a deceleration curve when the phone is dropped, like there would be when thrown up.

[ilyagr]

Good question! I wonder if it can detect friction against air.

[yreg]

I think we need to wait for phones with air pressure sensors.

[extraduder_ire]

There have been a few of those already, for at least a decade. IIRC, there was some weather app that crowdsourced readings from users with certain motorola phones and gave shockingly granular weather.