Do you regularly use the iPhone’s Stocks app to check on the market? How about doing those simple math calculations over the iPhone Calculator app? If you are planning to get the iPad, remember that you may no longer be having these apps on the new tablet device.
First and foremost, these are not the hottest apps on the iPhone. In fact, there are several third party apps that do a better job. Secondly, we all knew that these apps are not on the HomeScreen the day the iPad was unveiled. However, there were numerous speculations over why they were missing. Some suggested that these apps may be put up on the App Store, a-la iBooks for users to download only if they need it. Another group of users saw hints of multitasking coming to the iPad whereby these “minor apps” may be relegated to a Mac-esque dashboard that can invoked with hot keys.
It now seems that neither of these theories is true. John Gruber from Daring Fireball cites close inside sources as having told him that these apps have been removed for good from the iPad because Steve Jobs didn’t like them there. Gruber writes
“It’s not that Apple couldn’t just create bigger versions of these apps and have them run on the iPad. It wasn’t a technical problem, it was a design problem. There were, internally to Apple (of course), versions of these apps (or at least some of them) with upscaled iPad-sized graphics, but otherwise the same UI and layout as the iPhone versions. Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who.”
So praise the Jobs for being fair and neutral..It’s not just the third party app developers who have been facing the axe of late.
[Daring Fireball via Wired]