The standout feature of the iPhone 6S is its 3D Touch screen, which uses pressure sensors behind the screen to tell the difference between a normal tap and a heavy press. That same system can also be put to work as a kind of digital scale – and several developers have done just that.
Gravity
One of the best known is Ryan McLeod’s Gravity app. You simply rest a spoon over your iPhone’s display, calibrate it using some objects of known weight (like coins), then you can place anything you like in the spoon to weigh it. The demo looks quite convincing, with the app successfully totting up the weights of coffee beans, spices and even iPhone chargers.
Unfortunately, it’s not possible to download and use the Gravity app at the moment, as Apple denied the developer’s request to add his app to the App Store. Ultimately, Apple ruled that ‘the concept of a scale app was not appropriate for the App Store.’ That’s a bit of a bummer, but all hope is not yet lost.
Plum-o-meter
Of course, outside of the App Store anything is possible. So far we haven’t seen a full app like Gravity for weighing objects, but there is one released app that uses the new iPhone’s 3D Touch capabilities. It’s called Plum-o-meter, and as the name suggests it is an app for weighing plums. You place two plums on the iPhone at once, and the larger one will be highlighted with a yellow outline. Unfortunately no direct weight readout is provided, but the developer promises to get some calibrated weights and try to add this functionality into the app soon.
If you want to try it, the Plum-o-meter app is available for jail-broken iPhones only… and you’ll need an iOS Developer Account and Xcode installed. If that’s true for you, you can find the source code over on Github.
The future
Of course, this won’t be the end of digital scale apps for the iPhone 6S (and beyond). Sooner or later, an enterprising developer will get a good scale app onto the Cydia repositories, or even onto the App Store itself. After all, shouldn’t “There’s an app for that” apply to scales too?
And if you really want a smartphone that works as a scale, have a look at the Huwaei Mate S, where a weighing app comes pre-installed on the phone to advertise its own pressure-sensitive screen.
Would you use your iPhone as a digital scale? Let us know in the comments below!