According to a report earlier today, it seemed that Apple has decided to disallow the inclusion of calculators in its widgets area. Apparently this goes against one of Apple’s policies that states that Notification Center widgets are not allowed to perform calculations. Developer James Thomson was asked to remove his PCalc widget as it was one of the apps that violated the alleged terms.
Well it looks like Apple has since had a change of heart. Either the Cupertino company realized that such a policy was never in effect, or they decided to just give in to the masses, we’ll never know, but they have since reallowed the PCalc widget. This was confirmed by an Apple spokesperson to the folks at TechCrunch.
This was also confirmed by Thomson himself on Twitter where he wrote, “Just had a phone call from Apple – decision has been reversed, no changes required to PCalc’s widget. Thanks to everybody for their support!”
We’ll have to admit that having a calculator widget makes a lot of sense. This is compared to users swiping up to access Control Center and then launching the calculator app. With widgets, users just need to swipe down and start calculating which saves them an additional step. In any case PCalc is a paid app that will cost $9.99. Alternatively there is PCalc Lite which is a free version that has widget functionality as well.