The iPhone 6S's new Force Touch screen is good for more than just cruising through apps and UI shortcuts. By measuring downward force, it's also essentially a scale. While it takes a little bit of work to turn that into a scale you can use, it can be done. And then Apple will reject it from the App Store.

The Gravity app, developed by Ryan McLeod and friends, is a clever little innovation. As McLeod explains in a post on Medium, after several misfires, the team was eventually able to figure out that by using a spoon both as a makeshift basket to hold objects, and a makeshift finger to fool the phone's screen into thinking it was being touched, you can make a digital scale that's accurate almost to the gram. It's got nothing on an actual digital scale, but it beats trying to guess.

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Unfortunately, the Gravity app was initially rejected from the App Store for having a misleading description, and McLeod initially believed that may have been due to the great number of other, crappier scale apps floating around, which make use of the phone's tilt sensor or are just out-and-out jokes.

But during a phone call, Apple clarified that it just didn't want any scale apps. At least not right now. McLeod has several guesses as to why, the most obvious is that this app—while novel—is clearly not using the iPhone's Force Touch for its intended purpose. Digital scales also have a connotation with drug use, though the Gravity app isn't quite accurate enough to measure drugs with any reliability.

So while the iPhone 6S does have the capability to be a pretty decent scale through some very clever engineering, you won't get the chance to use it as one. You'll just have to keep trying to guess at roughly how many paperclips you think something weighs.

Source: Medium via The Verge

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