Apple Rejects 'Gravity' App That Turns Your iPhone 6s Into a Real Digital Scale [Video]

Developer Ryan McLeod and his friends have managed to turn the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus into a real-life digital scale. Thanks to 3D touch, the 'Gravity' app would be able to weigh items up to 385 grams (about .85 lbs) within 1-3 grams of accuracy. Over the weekend, we also saw a demonstration of 3D touch weighing plums, but that demo only showed which item was heavier.

To accomplish this creative use of 3D touch, Ryan and his team first had to find a way to calibrate the app's scale. Apple's 3D touch API measure weight on a custom scale of 0.00 to "maximum possible force," with 1.00 being an average touch. To calibrate the app, the team needed to find a common household item that was conductive and had finger-like capacitance. It turns out a spoon was the perfect solution, since it was able to hold and balance the objects as well.

Unfortunately, Apple rejected Gravity for having a "misleading description."

Gravity unfortunately got rejected for having a misleading description and we immediately knew why: There are a couple dozen “scale” apps on the app store. The thing is that 80% of them are joke apps, “for entertainment purposes only” and the other 20% try to weigh things using the tilt of your iPhone once it’s been balanced on top of an inflated bag and calibrated using a single coin. Gravity was most likely confused with the prank apps and rejected for claiming it was a real working scale.

Ryan made a demo video of the application and submitted an appeal to the Apple App Store review team, but unfortunately Apple did not approve the app. Apple's reasoning for the rejection was that a concept of a scale app was not appropriate for the App Store.

As Ryan notes in his blog post, there could be several reasons behind Apple's rejection. People could damage iPhone 6s screens by weighing items that are too heavy, although the Gravity app did flash a red warning indicator when an object exceeded 385 grams. Additionally, Apple could see Gravity's odd use of the 3D Touch API as misuse of the API.


Check out the video below of the Gravity app in action and let us know what you think in the comments.

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