iOS Calculator Bug
Is the iOS 11 Calculator slow for anyone else? Do button anims need to complete now? 1+2+3+4 at this speed should work fine…
1+2+3+4 = 28?
It’s the + after the 2 isn’t hit. But it should be hit. Look how slow I’m tapping!
Here’s a fun one: open the iOS 11 calculator. Rapidly type 1 + 2 + 3. Odds are you won’t get 6…
Apple software is buggy, but surely the iOS calculator can still do 1+2+3 correctly.
Calculator in iOS 11 has such a long animation (and blocks all other touches) that it’s unusable. Burn it down.
I hadn’t seen this bug before, probably because I use PCalc, but I was easily able to reproduce it, even with Reduce Motion on.
See also: Reddit.
Update (2017-10-24): Marco Scheurer:
First (only?) default app coded in Swift and “Swift code is safe by design, yet also produces software that runs lightning-fast”. The irony.
When you hit the plus sign for the second time, the calculator app goes into some odd state. Not sure if this is intentional, or a bug, but either way, this is not what you’d expect.
In case you’re tempted to write a Radar on this, 70+ people have beaten you to it.
Update (2017-10-25): Rosyna Keller:
The interesting part is that this is a very old bug. Just now getting news.
This made me realize that bug marketing is a thing. If you want an annoying, but fairly inconsequential bug fixed, find a way to make it go viral.
Update (2017-10-26): See also: MacRumors.
Update (2017-10-29): Nacho Soto is seeing a similar bug on macOS 10.13.
Update (2017-10-30): Juli Clover:
The new iOS 11.2 beta, released to developers this morning, addresses a Calculator animation issue that’s been present since iOS 11 was released to the public in September and throughout the iOS 11 beta testing process.
Update (2017-11-13): See also: The Talk Show.
Update (2017-12-02): Rob Griffiths:
The Calculator bug persists in iOS 11.2. It’s not as bad as it was before, but it’s definitely still there. You don’t even have to tap super fast; I can make it happen whether I’m using two fingers or one. As long as a couple of button taps are within a reasonably-quick amount of time, you’ll get the wrong answer.
Update (2018-01-31): Benjamin Mayo:
In iOS 11.3, the Calculator works when typing quickly AND the fade animation on the buttons is back. Happy that they went back and did it properly after the quick-fix in 11.2 where they got rid of the animation altogether.
Update (2026-07-20): Marcin Wichary:
Understanding all this, many calculator makers even already in the 19th century spent a wild amount of effort convincing people not just that their devices are helpful, and fast, and easy to use, but also that they can be trusted. Buttons were carefully weighted. Comptometers came with a locking mechanism. If a machine felt something didn’t go right, it would stop working and require a hard reset. The message was: “You can trust me, because I won’t ever show you bad math, and I’ll stop myself before I will ever lie to you.” Charles Babbage was so confident in his Difference Engine that he welcomed people to try to mess with its mechanical wheels in the middle of the calculation, confident even a sabotaged machine won’t ever make a mistake.
Just like with the Selectric decades later, those things were solved by people who cared, in the much harsher mechanical conditions.
Of course, I don’t expect everybody at Apple core iOS team to be a calculator UI historian (although it would be nice for at least one person on the team to be one!). It is embarrassing that no one on the team had enough imagination to realize that making a button respond to a quick press during animation, but not register it would cause all sorts of serious trouble.
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
My dad upgraded to iOS 11 the other day and was complaining about it doing wrong math, treating 1 + 2 / 3 as 1 + (2 / 3)—which *I* know is order of operations, but it's not how simple calculators work, and I think to most people this app models a simple calculator—but in exploring that, we were also able to reproduce some circumstances/calculations where pressing an operator displayed an intermediate result (as if you'd hit = followed by the next operator) and thereby the correct/intended final result. That's even worse, because it's completely inconsistent—sometimes in "order-of-operations mode" and sometimes in "normal calculator mode."
