No Calculator App On My iPad? WHY?
Oh no! How will I do my mathematical calculations on my 800$ iPad!!!
The average iPhone user and Mac user drown themselves in the pleasure of solving maths using the calculator app on their premium, exclusive, and beautifully designed devices. However, since the inception of the iPad, users have been deprived of the right to do maths on their devices.“Why?” asks the Android user, because the iPad still does not have a calculator app!
To understand why the iPad does not have a calculator app, we need a history lesson. During the iPad’s development, a man named Scott Forstall was leading its software program. He did some great work for Apple by introducing many features we still use today. However, the calculator on the iPad is not one of them. You see, he might have cut some corners by just scaling up the calculator app from the iPhone to the iPad.
The software team then looked at the calculator app on the iPad and expected it to ship the device with it. However, Steve Jobs saw the iPad one month before launch and was horrified to see that the calculator app was just scaled up and stretched out. This did not sit well with Steve Jobs. He gave Scott Forstall an ultimatum, he needs to either design a new calculator app within the given window or it won’t ship with the app at all. Guess what Scott chose to do.
All of Apple's devices are a product of great design choices that provide peerless value to its users. If you breathe, Android will introduce a new feature that then overwhelms the user and they end up not using the feature at all. It eventually becomes a talking point to flex over Apple users. That is the only value the new rushed features provide for Android users.
Well, this still doesn't answer why the iPad does not have a calculator app even after its 12 years of existence. It's not the first time we’ve seen Apple stuck in design limbo. They introduced copy-paste later than Android and the app library far later in the iPhone. When MKBHD, asked Craig Federighi he said that they’ll have a calculator app when they can make it a great calculator app on the iPad.
To see how hard it is to get the calculator app right on the iPad you need to use some of the third-party ones. But before that let's see what makes iPhone's calculator app so great.
Every number and operation is within reach using a single hand
Simple and Intuitive also adheres to Dieter Rams' 10 principles of design
The buttons are spaced out to reduce mistakes
Colors are used to emphasize operations
Third-party apps do get some of those right on the iPad, however many if not all are confusing, buttons are not spaced properly and in general very difficult to use. To design a calculator app for the iPad, it needs to be optimized for all versions of the device. It needs to fit beautifully on large screens and it needs to be peerlessly user-friendly.
It is a tall order, however, the day will come when all the math lovers in the world will rejoice. They will celebrate the birth of a great app by Apple, an app that will shock the world, an app that will revolutionize doing maths on the iPad the day will come when we will have a built-in calculator app on all our iPads.
Written by Muqaddim Jawad Noor
