I obviously can't answer for this particular case, but my first thought on why I would consider doing such a thing is if I had an app in which number of days old was something that had to be queried, displayed, and/or used in other functions/queries a massive number of times per day in the course of normal application usage. If the application had low usage, or number of days old was infrequently queried/displayed/used, I wouldn't consider it. The moment I found that significant time & resources were spent calculating the value in normal/regular usage, I'd start looking at ways to reduce that time & resource usage. How to go about it varies, but the win of that value being immediately available without computation could mean a lot to an app/business and its users.