iPad calculator (sort of) provided by Google rather than Apple

Why there is no official iPad calculator app is one of the mysteries of the universe, ranking alongside “What is dark matter?” and “What is the biological mechanism for the placebo effect?” …

Of course, there are any number of third-party apps out there, but Google has now offered its own solution in the form of a web app.

Our sister site 9to5Google spotted it.

Google has rebuilt Chrome OS’s built-in Calculator app, making it available for all devices, not just Chromebooks.

For years now, Chromebook owners have been able to use Google’s free calculator app. It’s built with Web technology but is a native app, pre-installed with Chrome OS. The app starts off with a simple layout for addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and can be expanded to reveal tools for geometry and trigonometry.

Macworld suggested it as a pseudo iPad calculator app.

Every other staple iPhone app is there on iPad—Notes, Safari, Files, Mail, Messages, Stocks, even Clock—but if we want to add or multiply we need to turn to a third-party app.

There are plenty of good ones in the App Store, but few have what we’re looking for: a simple interface that loads instantly and doesn’t have any unnecessary features. You know, like the iPhone app that should have been ported to the iPad a decade ago. Thankfully, Google has made an excellent calculator for ChromeOS that works any browser. You can find it at https://calculator.apps.chrome and save it to your home screen by tapping the Share button.

You of course need to be online to visit the page, but once you have it loaded in your browser, it works offline.

The site’s Michael Simon says that it looks good. To me, that’s something of an exaggeration, but it looks inoffensive, and the display is extremely readable – which is more than can be said for many calculator apps out there.

Some have suggested that Apple doesn’t offer an iPad calculator app because it’s hard to make one that looks good on the larger screen of a tablet. But it does seem a perfect use case for a Slide Over app, so maybe Apple could make one that always opens in that mode. Or perhaps we’ll have to wait until iPadOS finally supports something closer to a true windowed environment …