Speaking of laptop batteries as a UPS source, some laptops come with battery management features that keep the battery healthy even when plugged in full time, usually exposed as a setting in the BIOS/UEFI. I've found that business/enterprise type laptops like Thinkpads and Probooks have this as standard, for example Thinkpads from 2010 already had this, assuming you're lucky enough to find one with a usable battery of course.
Congratulations on launching William. There's quite a bit of criticism here that'll help you refine your app I think. I'm working on a something similar and already learning from the discussion here around user experience and privacy. All the best.
As I read this, Greenspun's tenth rule of programming humorously came to mind: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
Generalized by replacing "C or Fortran" with a language where the user wants more power over it's syntax and semantics, to witness the author pull it off in just 44 lines of JavaScript was a joy.
You make fair points in that micro services are not a silver bullet, the functional wins I perceive aren't automatic and I intentionally build a service in that way to get the functional benefits.
So yes there is a caveat, if a service doesn't return the same output for the same input then some benefits of the approach are lost. I would like to add an additional benefit for teams of programmers, in that each team gets the ability to build out a service using whichever technology they find suitable i.e language, frameworks etc. Something I personally find difficult to do with a monolith.
TLDR: Micro services offer a REPL like experience for application architecture.
The way I see it, micro-services are the architectural analogues of functional programming. They let me build pieces of an application similar to a function, including tests and debugging in isolation without the fear of unintentionally messing up data somewhere.
This similarity to functions even extends to how micro services are used, calling their API's with keyword arguments e.g get post name id json etc