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Turning the iPhone 6s Into a Digital Scale

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Re: Turning the iPhone 6s Into a Digital Scale

#51

Post by IkmoIkmo »

dea74747 wrote: post #16

Drug related? An app allowing reasonably-accurate weighing of samples with 0.1g resolution has significant black market applications.

A phone, a car, a wallet, plastic bags, lighters... they're all ubiquitously used by the drug industry. Preventing scales because of illicit use of weighing something is like banning cutlery because they can be used as weapons, banning cars because they can be getaway cars, banning phones because they can be used to setup illicit trades, etc etc. I think it's a bit silly and I don't think it'd affect the brand any more than it already is (peruse drug culture on social media and you'll find plenty of iphones featured, it hasn't affected the brand at all in a negative way, it's still a luxury item and people still view it as a phone you'd love to gift to family of any age if money is of no concern).

Re: Turning the iPhone 6s Into a Digital Scale

#52

Post by pjlegato »

I thought this was a great article, until the end where the author not only gives up, but writes a meek apologietic stating that Apple is clearly and wholly right to block people from running any software it doesn't like on their own phones, without explanation.

Does Apple retaliate against people who complain about the App Store review process in public or something?

Re: Turning the iPhone 6s Into a Digital Scale

#53

Post by pjlegato »

threeseed wrote: post #25
tsotha wrote: post #14

>Apple has a moral and ethical onus to make the right choices be it related to the confederate flag, changing drug laws, or using emoji to fight bullying, and we respect that. I can't decide if he really respects that or if he's still hoping to get his app approved. Companies should not be in the business of trying to enforce (clearly unenforceable) laws by removing features that do perfectly legal things.

But companies equally have a right to own the experience. Creating an app to harvest hardware identifiers and using that to track them is legal. But it tarnishes the experience of their product and is anti-consumer by every definition. Apple should have the ability not to allow that. Just because something is legal does not make it morally or ethically "right".

The company doesn't own your phone. You do.

Surely YOU should be the one who decides what constitutes "proper" software to run on hardware that you purchased?

Re: Turning the iPhone 6s Into a Digital Scale

#54

Post by fpgeek »

CyberDildonics wrote: post #48
cguess wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really really obvious reason they did this. People are dumb. Someone, probably very soon, and probably more than one or even ten people, would overload the weight and crack their screen. At which point they would show up at the Apple Store DEMANDING a brand new phone. When they didn't get the repair because they're too stupid to understand how glass works they would contact CNN or HuffPo or whatever and there'd be a…

And 16 year olds take pictures and effectively create child porn, but how far are you going to go to protect someone from being ridiculous?

Image recognition is improving all the time. Don't give them any ideas...

Re: Turning the iPhone 6s Into a Digital Scale

#55

Post by pjlegato »

tsotha wrote: post #14

>Apple has a moral and ethical onus to make the right choices be it related to the confederate flag, changing drug laws, or using emoji to fight bullying, and we respect that. I can't decide if he really respects that or if he's still hoping to get his app approved. Companies should not be in the business of trying to enforce (clearly unenforceable) laws by removing features that do perfectly legal things.

Completely aside from the merits of anti-drug laws, the number of perfectly legitimate applications for "weighing things" is vastly larger than the number of illegal ones.

Re: Turning the iPhone 6s Into a Digital Scale

#56

Post by nosuchthing »

nosuchthing wrote: post #12

A year or two ago some developer [0] figured out how to code some sort of pseudo pressure sensitivity into a music making app, which seemed to work well from what I heard. Apple eventually banned the app from their store citing improper use of the code base. [0] trying to search for it, seems lost to the memory hole

The app was called "Orphion", and it had several methods for detecting gestures/articulations: a gentle finger tip touch, a tap, and a push down. Apple cited forbidden private API use.

http://createdigitalmusic.com/2013/06/hands-off-apple-wants-...

  Apple just called me to nicely tell me I use a private 
  API function to sense the area of the screen which is 
  covered by the finger for its articulation gesture ([CDM] 
  wrote about it). This is crazy – thousands of users love 
  it for this and it makes Orphion so expressive.


  The app will be removed from the App Store in two weeks 
  if I don’t submit a new version without it – and I 
  currently can’t think of Orphion without this gesture.


  So what I can recommend is


  1. Everyone who wants to have the “original” Orphion get 
  it NOW from the app store (https://itunes.apple.com/us/app
  /orphion/id495465097), it will be only be there for a few 
  more days

  2. Backup the current version to keep it. (Michael Tyson 
  from Audiobus made this great tutorial)

  3. Tell Apple to make this great function officially 
  usable in apps (Any ideas how to do that?)

  So far… let’s see if this is really the end of Orphion.
...looks like the petition worked and Orphion was allowed to keep the gesture functionality; https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/orphion/id495465097

Re: Turning the iPhone 6s Into a Digital Scale

#58

Post by adrusi »

I doubt that Apple's primary concern is people breaking their screens. It would actually be quite difficult to break your screen by putting heavy weights onto a spoon.

No, Apple's concern is supporting this app to the future. They don't know if they'll be sticking with this same kind of sensor for future models, and they don't know that any future sensor will be backwards compatible for this app. If people get used to using this app, suddenly they'd be under an obligation to keep it working, thus losing options for future designs.

Re: Turning the iPhone 6s Into a Digital Scale

#59

Post by fpgeek »

threeseed wrote: post #43
oxide wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the only thing I can imagine cracking the screen is trying to weigh a person. is that really something Apple would have to pay for? seems like something like that would fall well in "your fault" territory from my perspective. my first thought was drugs, might be handy to have a scale in my pocket sometimes.

But only Apple would know how much weight the force touch sensors can sustain before they are damaged.

If weight on the screen often breaks the force touch sensors without breaking the screen, that's an ugly UI problem. Even with a low "force touch / no screen" accident rate (< 1%), there could easily be tens or hundreds of thousands of users walking around with broken force touch sensors that have no idea their phone has a problem - because there's no visible signal that anything's wrong. They'll just think force touch is broken and/or unreliable. That's no way to promote the adoption of a new feature.
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