But will you gain anything by building for it? Will you see noticeably more users or people choosing another alternative because you didn't specifically building the app for Duo? At least if it doesn't outright break.
Will you see noticeably more users or people choosing another alternative because you didn't specifically building the app for Duo?
I haven't done iOS development in a long time, but my understanding is that if your iPhone app is designed well and uses all of Apple's recommended methods, adjusting for different screen sizes and orientations is fairly easy.
If you decided to go cheap/easy/dumb from the outset, then you made your bed, and now you get to lie in it.
I would get a little bit of joy if a duo user noticed the effort I put into making my app work well on their device. Why put effort into anything? Your take is bordering dangerously on cynicism. :)
Duo users also likely have disposable income to spend on in app purchases, maybe click on ads to purchase things, and other monetization. So I do think it's worth building for it.
He talks about a Steve Jobs story where he moved a piece of furniture and notes that the back, which would be against the wall, was still finished as nicely as the front, even though you’d never see it day to day.
He compares this to Apple products being beautiful on the inside as well as the outside. Even the cheapest products are like this.
There’s another story going around about the new guy, from his early days working on an Apple display. He was inspecting a supplier and discovered that the screws in the back had 35 grooves on the head versus the 25 specified. He ended up arguing with the supplier and making them fix it. Not because the grooves were core to the product, but because it’s important to get things right.
In short, craftsmanship. Build things well. Take care of the details. Make your stuff beautiful even if only a few people will ever see it. Even if nobody will ever see it.
Sure, an app maker could say, the Duo will be a small percentage of our user base, who cares if our app looks like shit to them. And quite a few of them will, I’m sure. And people will notice that these apps look and work like garbage on some of their friends’ and families’ phones. And this attitude will not confine itself to this one thing. These same app makers will say, who cares if this button is a little clipped. Who cares if the screen flashes during launch. Who cares if it takes five seconds to launch. Will we lose a noticeable number of users?
And that’s how we end up with legions of apps that are hot trash. Many of them will do fine despite that. My health insurance’s app is hot trash and they’re not losing me as a customer. But the company that makes the hardware and software their app runs on is way more successful than they are. Obviously a big part of that is down to what industry they’re in. But some of it is because Apple finishes the back of their furniture.
You could say this about every QoL feature though. That’s not a reason to not do it though, it adds up and at some point other apps that do bother to make their apps as good as possible will become more popular than yours.
We're not talking about 0/1 here. There's making sure the app works and looks ok on the Duo and then there's building out Duo specific features. The works/looks ok is generally pretty easy with new devices. Just build with the new SDK and fix places where the app wasn't doing something likely already suggested by Apple. A big one will be safe areas which people often ignored except on the top and bottom.
Not really. It's an iPad + iPhone. That's hardly exotic. Both of those product categories sell very well. People who own an iPad mini and an iPhone have every reason to consider this for the merged cost.
I use an iPad Mini every day (I’m on it, right now). I also have a big iPad Pro, that I never use.
It’s likely that I will end up getting a Duo, eventually. I’m not in a hurry. I’ll bet that there will be teething problems.
I suspect all my apps will run OK on Duos. I have been designing for flexible iOS screen dimensions since Day One (2012). It was a habit I already had, from MacOS development, and all my apps work in landscape mode (It’s shocking, how many apps you can break, simply by turning the phone 90 degrees). Looks like an open Duo is about the same dimensions as running an iOS app on Mac (by default—you can easily resize Mac iOS app windows).
I am interested in seeing if I can leverage running on inside and outside screens. That might be interesting (but I don’t know if that’s possible. They probably switch off the outer screen, when the device is open).
I’ll bet that Apple ships an Apple Pen Mini, for Duos.
I really wanted to use it as my primary computing display, but as is almost always the case with Apple, the amazing hardware was hamstrung by the crippled OS.
Even just being able to use it as a generic display i.e. with a Nintendo Switch would have been amazing.
It is indeed a niche product. Its price reflects the sales expectations of Apple.
But its form factor has been validated for almost a decade now from other manufacturers. So iPhone Duo will do fine. It will not surpass a slab iPhone but fine.
Vision Pro was a completely new beast, the hardware was not there, the market was not there.
My only concern is that they'll sell out so quickly for so long that I'll have to wait for the iPhone Duo Two-o because they won't be easy to get until like May 2027.
It's worth noting that "niche" in this case means ~10M in its first year, comparted to an estimated 250M Apple smartphone shipments in 2027. So far, Apple has sold ~600K Vision Pro in total.
Also, supporting Duo is not an enormous lift if you're already supporting resizable windows, as developers are required to do for OS 27.
Yeah the market had shown that anything bulkier/heavier than a pair of regular glasses is not acceptable. Not sure why apple released it unless it is a glorified dev kit that would allow devs imagine a use case for a product that is 10 years away.
I know exactly one person who has a foldable phone and I live in sf.
If we're comparing anecdotes, when I lived in the states far from sf many tech people I knew had folding phones. They loved them and I was curious, but I like iOS.
Developer here. Apple often rejects app submissions if the app doesn't look optimized for some iPhone device or iPad device. So won't be surprised if they reject new apps and updates for not being optimized for the Duo. This could be their way of getting developers to comply.
That seems like a tough road. They've never been able to enforce that iPhone app makers build an iPad-compatible version or vice versa, and this looks exactly like that scenario.
It's mostly enforced, the only exception being apps with a legitimate iPhone-only hardware dependency.
iPhone apps must function on iPad in iPhone-compatibility mode, apps must support window resizability as of OS 27, and apps can't detect iPad and refuse to run. And I don't think this is new, but setting the target to iPhone-only doesn't prevent iPhone apps from running on iPad.
It really feels quite irrelevant. Also, the amount of work to support this with zero support from Apple since WWDC is just absurd. And even if one does the work, Apple will just sherlock the cool features into their apps.
And when did Apple decide to grace us with tools to support the Duo? Yeah, 3 hours ago. This should've been out in June so they can also get the feedback about all the silly design choices the Duo brings (and the bugs in that simulator). Too bad I can't just send them an invoice for all the wasted time.
I think this is my main hesitation with picking up the Duo on the first release. I have no doubt the build quality is exceptional, but the chance that the apps I use are not well optimized for this new form factor is pretty high in the first year of its release.
I don't think they won't work, but I anticipate oddities to appear for a while, especially for older applications.
I’m not sure about this, we already support resizing on our app for a while now because of our iPad/mac catalyst version, so I fail to see how different it would be on the Duo.
I assume other apps will have have the same, since our team is super small compared to everyone else.
This is my feeling too. It looks great - I think I might pick one up. But I’m going to give apple a few years to iron out the bugs first. Version 3 of the duo will be a much better product than version 1.
Waiting for my coding agent to have zero idea what I mean when I say build for iPhone duo (due to knowledge cutoffs in pre-training; happened when Liquid Glass came out previously).
I coincidentally asked Gemini a question about the iPhone Duo a few hours ago and, while it seemed to understand that it's a folding phone, it confidently hallucinated that in "tent" pose, there would be a display visible from both sides. In reality, only one side in this pose is the display, the other side is just back glass with the large cameras.
They finally released the full experience a few months back. I think their original excuse (years ago) was that 'people take photos on iPhone so iPad is unnecessary for Instagram'.
Tongue half in cheek, my point is that agents may be unreliable with fresh libraries.
It looks like there are some fun edge cases too:
A reserved region can be active or inactive. For example, a reserved region that represents the fold is active when iPhone Duo is partially open, but inactive when it is fully open.
Note: I'm scrubbing it against the final 27.1 beta SDK as I type this, so it's likely that its Duo knowledge will get an update within the next few hours.
Fun fact, I’ve now worked on the surface duo (technically the windows version not the android version) and the iPhone duo.
I thought the ideas of the surface duo were great and I’m super excited to see them evolved and shipped in a product that I think a lot of people are going to love.
Fired it up to check my own app (RunnerCast) and it looks fine. The Liquid Glass menu moves from the bottom to the right side automatically both on the inner and outer screens. If you already had a layout that worked for iOS and iPadOS, things adapt fine to the inside screen and when you go split screen with two apps, the layout adapts nicely. I don't think I'll need to do a thing.
I've also noticed a flurry of recent app updates from some of the bigger apps (MLB, NYTimes, etc.) to switch to the Liquid Glass menu which I assume Apple strongly suggested they do prior to the Duo launch.
It’s really interesting to note how the bigger apps deferred adopting Liquid Glass altogether until iOS 26 is out for almost a year. Do most developers making large apps also loathe it? Do they have in-house designers telling them not to adopt it?
iOS 27 SDK will ignore the liquid glass compatibility flag, so the developers are now being forced to adopt it, unless they choose to stay with an old SDK version and all the hassle it brings.
Most apps people actually use will look fine because there's a team of mobile devs in all big companies who get paid to keep up with Apple breaking their apps every year with their 'updates' (among other things).
I mean, don't expect advanced features like consistent smooth scrolling, non-broken UI, absence of animation flickers, cloud sync that works consistently even for paid apps developed by Apple or anybody else but other than that :)
This is the first time we get an iPhone skew that is significantly different and with no sales track record.
For instance, very few company bothered to do anything for the Vision Pro. Now we'll see if Google or Microsoft for instance see the iPhone Duo as a main line product or an exotic offshoot that needs to prove itself before any money is spent on it.
Apps that support iPad are 95% fine unless you do crazy custom things (which Apple has been telling developers for decades now that they shouldn’t do), and apps that are phone only are letterboxed, but still entirely usable.
How many customers do you expect to be running on Duo for the first year of its existence?
I’d be surprised if it was >0.01% for anyone. Apple wants you to drop everything to support all the bells and whistles for their new device, but even if you take 3 months to fix minor layout bugs, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.
I have friends who dropped everything to support the Vision Pro, and I don’t think any of them felt like it was worth it in retrospect. Even the ones that got featured by Apple as a result didn’t see more than a few thousand downloads.
How many customers do you expect to be running on Duo for the first year of its existence?
I’d be surprised if it was >0.01% for anyone.
How do you figure? Assume the average Apple cell phone replacement cycle is somewhere between 3 and 4 years. At the longer end, you’d need the sell-through rate of the Duo compared to other phones to be less than 0.04% to hit your number. We know from the Mini and other phones that Apple tends to avoid designs that it expects to have less than a 5% sell rate, two orders of magnitude higher. Even if you assume they’re aiming for 5% of dollars instead of units, and you take into account the non-Apple market (which certainly should not be unit-weighted for folks thinking about app revenue), you’re off by well over an order of magnitude.
Although maybe they should because someone willing to buy a $2000 phone on launch is probably more willing to buy a lot more things versus someone who keeps phones a long time.
Why? If you’re spending 2000 hours a year servicing your current customers, surely it’s worth 20 hours to add on 1%, even ignoring that that 1% is probably more valuable than your average customer, and the halo effect of giving a good experience to existing users migrating devices.
Apple does many crazy custom things in their own apps. Their advice is not sacrosanct. It just means you must prepare for less notice than they had if you want to compete with the frontier UI aspects that Apple apps achieve.
I have friends who dropped everything to support the Vision Pro, and I don’t think any of them felt like it was worth it in retrospect. Even the ones that got featured by Apple as a result didn’t see more than a few thousand downloads.
They should remember that they got quite a bit of social capital within Apple by doing that and hopefully they're keeping those relationships warm. But yeah Vision Pro hasn't turned out to be a big ecosystem so far.
Because Apple has always treated its developers so well!
Vision Pro will be cancelled at some point, it’s just nowhere near popular enough and never will be - the air has gone out of that VR bubble.
I wouldn’t be surprised if duo is also cancelled because it is another copycat move which is not central to Apples business and will not be mass market.
Usually just compiling with the new SDK will get apps basic support if they have been following Apple standards.
I have friends who dropped everything to support the Vision Pro
The VP was a niche device for a niche market. Phones are not that. I think the Duo will do very well. The one knock are the cameras do not match the Pro. I don't think will care though.
Because despite Apple having clear guidelines a huge number of developers think their 'custom UI' is what customers really want. When they don't. The best apps use system components and follow the HIG. Always have, always will. Your custom tab bar is stupid.
Unless Apple uses their stick (whip, or whatever else) to drive the developer community, I bet iOS will experience the same app fragmentation as Android does regarding various form factors, more so than between iPad, iPhone and iWatch already.
I expect that most apps will look rather broken on release, but it will be smoothed out eventually.
I don’t think it'll be "most apps".
Apple all but told developers in June [1] to update their apps not to assume a fixed screen size.
One of the apps Apple's engineers demonstrate new features was called Origami [2]. When I watched the video, it seemed pretty clear: a device that folds was in our future.
If you’re a developer that's kept up with the latest iOS developments, you'll be in good shape for the Duo.
But if you're up to your eyeballs in technical debt using deprecated frameworks and APIs… it's probably gonna be a while for you.
Apple’s Developer Documentation is historically pretty terrible. So I’d be curious to see if they stepped it up for the agent instructions for the new API’s.
Apple's current docs suck, and they have, for a long time (SwiftUI was so bad, that someone came up with this[0], and it was a lifesaver).
But I'm old enough to remember Inside Macintosh[1], and that was a thing of beauty.
Apple used to take technical documentation very seriously. Many of their technical writers had better tech chops, than the engineers making the stuff they wrote about.
I really wish they still did, instead of focusing so much on trying to make it simple and obvious like in SwiftUI. Objective-C was a pinnacle of computing, and ever since Swift they've been devolving into the pursuit of oversimplifying and abstracting away the details such that they don't even feel necessary to teach anymore, even though as a new developer, I WANT TO KNOW THEM.
Certainly, these aren't new standards and have been available on Android. We like to offer a split page when a foldable is used in a book pose and avoid having anything (especially interactive elements) in the middle.
I started adding support for iPhone Duo in some of my apps. Here's an example of some of the work required https://mastodon.social/@simsaens/117296064810231465 — all my apps are hobby apps. Even though they all support iPad / resizability, it's still a large amount of work
I've been testing with Xcode 27.1 on the Duo simulator and I was pleasantly surprised that nearly everything worked well, untouched. The main thing I need a real device for is knowing which buttons are easier or harder to press on the right edge, but using modern UIKit this was not that difficult. That, and taking advantage of the left/right inner display content areas.
Now available for testing apps on the iPhone Duo!
Here are some screenshots from getting my own app compiled, if anyone is interested:
https://bsky.app/profile/cameronbanga.com/post/3mvsrxk5q7b2j
https://bsky.app/profile/cameronbanga.com/post/3mvss5wmxej2l
I'm just gonna ignore this thing and continue as if it never existed. Worked with Vision Pro that no body uses and will work with this.
taking the Apple strategy with the Apple ecosystem, genius
I'm not fangirling over it, but comparing it to Vision Pro is ridiculous.
But will you gain anything by building for it? Will you see noticeably more users or people choosing another alternative because you didn't specifically building the app for Duo? At least if it doesn't outright break.
But will you gain anything by building for it?
Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Will you see noticeably more users or people choosing another alternative because you didn't specifically building the app for Duo?
I haven't done iOS development in a long time, but my understanding is that if your iPhone app is designed well and uses all of Apple's recommended methods, adjusting for different screen sizes and orientations is fairly easy.
If you decided to go cheap/easy/dumb from the outset, then you made your bed, and now you get to lie in it.
I would get a little bit of joy if a duo user noticed the effort I put into making my app work well on their device. Why put effort into anything? Your take is bordering dangerously on cynicism. :)
No, it's based on pragmatism. Every feature is a cost/benefit tradeoff. You didn't answer the question: would it be worth it?
Duo users also likely have disposable income to spend on in app purchases, maybe click on ads to purchase things, and other monetization. So I do think it's worth building for it.
As a user, this attitude makes me sad.
As a professional programmer, it at least gratifies me to know this is the attitude I'm competing against.
Thanks for the backhanded compliment, very mature..
I'm not an iOS developer, never made an app at all, I asked because I'm curious. What is it really to gain?
I just happened across this video with Apple’s new CEO and how Apple does things: https://youtu.be/4pqF5KMHOr8
He talks about a Steve Jobs story where he moved a piece of furniture and notes that the back, which would be against the wall, was still finished as nicely as the front, even though you’d never see it day to day.
He compares this to Apple products being beautiful on the inside as well as the outside. Even the cheapest products are like this.
There’s another story going around about the new guy, from his early days working on an Apple display. He was inspecting a supplier and discovered that the screws in the back had 35 grooves on the head versus the 25 specified. He ended up arguing with the supplier and making them fix it. Not because the grooves were core to the product, but because it’s important to get things right.
In short, craftsmanship. Build things well. Take care of the details. Make your stuff beautiful even if only a few people will ever see it. Even if nobody will ever see it.
Sure, an app maker could say, the Duo will be a small percentage of our user base, who cares if our app looks like shit to them. And quite a few of them will, I’m sure. And people will notice that these apps look and work like garbage on some of their friends’ and families’ phones. And this attitude will not confine itself to this one thing. These same app makers will say, who cares if this button is a little clipped. Who cares if the screen flashes during launch. Who cares if it takes five seconds to launch. Will we lose a noticeable number of users?
And that’s how we end up with legions of apps that are hot trash. Many of them will do fine despite that. My health insurance’s app is hot trash and they’re not losing me as a customer. But the company that makes the hardware and software their app runs on is way more successful than they are. Obviously a big part of that is down to what industry they’re in. But some of it is because Apple finishes the back of their furniture.
You could say this about every QoL feature though. That’s not a reason to not do it though, it adds up and at some point other apps that do bother to make their apps as good as possible will become more popular than yours.
Can two people use opposite sides while in tent mode? Because that makes for some fun in-person games.
Apparently the camera has to be active to render on both displays
We're not talking about 0/1 here. There's making sure the app works and looks ok on the Duo and then there's building out Duo specific features. The works/looks ok is generally pretty easy with new devices. Just build with the new SDK and fix places where the app wasn't doing something likely already suggested by Apple. A big one will be safe areas which people often ignored except on the top and bottom.
It is exotic, and bring only a little to the table for a stiff price increase.
Not really. It's an iPad + iPhone. That's hardly exotic. Both of those product categories sell very well. People who own an iPad mini and an iPhone have every reason to consider this for the merged cost.
Exactly. Maybe not v1, but the Duo will likely lead me to not buy another iPad.
I use an iPad Mini every day (I’m on it, right now). I also have a big iPad Pro, that I never use.
It’s likely that I will end up getting a Duo, eventually. I’m not in a hurry. I’ll bet that there will be teething problems.
I suspect all my apps will run OK on Duos. I have been designing for flexible iOS screen dimensions since Day One (2012). It was a habit I already had, from MacOS development, and all my apps work in landscape mode (It’s shocking, how many apps you can break, simply by turning the phone 90 degrees). Looks like an open Duo is about the same dimensions as running an iOS app on Mac (by default—you can easily resize Mac iOS app windows).
I am interested in seeing if I can leverage running on inside and outside screens. That might be interesting (but I don’t know if that’s possible. They probably switch off the outer screen, when the device is open).
I’ll bet that Apple ships an Apple Pen Mini, for Duos.
I had the 1st-gen Vision Pro, and then sold it.
I really wanted to use it as my primary computing display, but as is almost always the case with Apple, the amazing hardware was hamstrung by the crippled OS.
Even just being able to use it as a generic display i.e. with a Nintendo Switch would have been amazing.
It is indeed a niche product. Its price reflects the sales expectations of Apple.
But its form factor has been validated for almost a decade now from other manufacturers. So iPhone Duo will do fine. It will not surpass a slab iPhone but fine.
Vision Pro was a completely new beast, the hardware was not there, the market was not there.
The price, hardware, and market was not there for the Vision Pro. There was no reason to buy a VR headset that couldn’t play games.
People famously said that of the first iPhone, expensive at the time.
Then about the $1k iPhone X.
Apple have made phones a fashion accessory and status symbol. I won’t be surprised if the Duo sells extreme well, even by iPhone standards.
My only concern is that they'll sell out so quickly for so long that I'll have to wait for the iPhone Duo Two-o because they won't be easy to get until like May 2027.
It's worth noting that "niche" in this case means ~10M in its first year, comparted to an estimated 250M Apple smartphone shipments in 2027. So far, Apple has sold ~600K Vision Pro in total.
Also, supporting Duo is not an enormous lift if you're already supporting resizable windows, as developers are required to do for OS 27.
The form factor of Vision Pro has also been validated for a decade from other manufacturers.
And that means nothing. Because other manufacturers are not doing well either.
Yeah the market had shown that anything bulkier/heavier than a pair of regular glasses is not acceptable. Not sure why apple released it unless it is a glorified dev kit that would allow devs imagine a use case for a product that is 10 years away.
I know exactly one person who has a foldable phone and I live in sf. I’ve never even considered getting one and I like new tech.
I’m not doubting that there’s demand for it but I wonder who/where?
I’m not doubting that there’s demand for it but I wonder who/where?
I spend a lot of time in hospitals, and I see doctors with them.
That may also explain why Apple isn't too worried about the price.
All over China/Asia, anecdotal statistic
If we're comparing anecdotes, when I lived in the states far from sf many tech people I knew had folding phones. They loved them and I was curious, but I like iOS.
Developer here. Apple often rejects app submissions if the app doesn't look optimized for some iPhone device or iPad device. So won't be surprised if they reject new apps and updates for not being optimized for the Duo. This could be their way of getting developers to comply.
That seems like a tough road. They've never been able to enforce that iPhone app makers build an iPad-compatible version or vice versa, and this looks exactly like that scenario.
It's mostly enforced, the only exception being apps with a legitimate iPhone-only hardware dependency.
iPhone apps must function on iPad in iPhone-compatibility mode, apps must support window resizability as of OS 27, and apps can't detect iPad and refuse to run. And I don't think this is new, but setting the target to iPhone-only doesn't prevent iPhone apps from running on iPad.
It really feels quite irrelevant. Also, the amount of work to support this with zero support from Apple since WWDC is just absurd. And even if one does the work, Apple will just sherlock the cool features into their apps.
Why does it feel irrelevant? And what kind of support should Apple be providing beyond releasing Xcode and an iPhone Duo simulator?
And when did Apple decide to grace us with tools to support the Duo? Yeah, 3 hours ago. This should've been out in June so they can also get the feedback about all the silly design choices the Duo brings (and the bugs in that simulator). Too bad I can't just send them an invoice for all the wasted time.
Honestly if they were really serious about this they would have released this back in December. Shame. Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave!!
Resources:
https://developer.apple.com/search/?q=iphone%20duo
Axiom: https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ (my FOSS project, updated for iPhone Duo)
What is your point? That they eventually released something? The simulator came out today... on Friday afternoon lol
I don't understand what you mean by "eventually" when you can't even pre-order it yet.
I presume this Xcode 27.1 beta will not want to launch on our Mavericks Forever, the last Mac OS we actually like and use.
Correct.
I think this is my main hesitation with picking up the Duo on the first release. I have no doubt the build quality is exceptional, but the chance that the apps I use are not well optimized for this new form factor is pretty high in the first year of its release.
I don't think they won't work, but I anticipate oddities to appear for a while, especially for older applications.
I’m not sure about this, we already support resizing on our app for a while now because of our iPad/mac catalyst version, so I fail to see how different it would be on the Duo.
I assume other apps will have have the same, since our team is super small compared to everyone else.
The small screen is so small they had to move controls to the right, I would expect glitches because of that, especially for custom controls.
Ok, I’ll test that, but I think we are using the safe areas correctly
Apps not rebuilt with the latest SDK will display in pillar-boxes mode, centred on the screen.
This is my feeling too. It looks great - I think I might pick one up. But I’m going to give apple a few years to iron out the bugs first. Version 3 of the duo will be a much better product than version 1.
Version 5 is when it'll be actually competitive.
Waiting for my coding agent to have zero idea what I mean when I say build for iPhone duo (due to knowledge cutoffs in pre-training; happened when Liquid Glass came out previously).
I coincidentally asked Gemini a question about the iPhone Duo a few hours ago and, while it seemed to understand that it's a folding phone, it confidently hallucinated that in "tent" pose, there would be a display visible from both sides. In reality, only one side in this pose is the display, the other side is just back glass with the large cameras.
Finally! So we have a little over a month between getting the simulator and first customers running our apps in Duo.
I expect that most apps will look rather broken on release, but it will be smoothed out eventually.
I expect that most apps will look rather broken on release, but it will be smoothed out eventually.
Sadly, many apps will continue to look rather broken.
There are still thousands of apps that still look wrong on iPad 16 years after its release, even with the 2x button pushed, for no good reason.
I think I heard that Instygram only recently figured it out.
Instagram released a Reels-first iPad app that is much, much worse than the old iPhone-on-iPad app.
They finally released the full experience a few months back. I think their original excuse (years ago) was that 'people take photos on iPhone so iPad is unnecessary for Instagram'.
To me that's said more about Instagram than the feasibility of building an app for a tablet.
"You are a experienced iOS Software Engineer, your task is to migrate this application to the iPhone Duo layout...
“Here is your iOS app migrated to Surface Duo…”
Tongue half in cheek, my point is that agents may be unreliable with fresh libraries.
It looks like there are some fun edge cases too:
source: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technologyoverview...
You may find Axiom (my FOSS project, updated for iPhone Duo) helpful. https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/
Note: I'm scrubbing it against the final 27.1 beta SDK as I type this, so it's likely that its Duo knowledge will get an update within the next few hours.
Fun fact, I’ve now worked on the surface duo (technically the windows version not the android version) and the iPhone duo.
I thought the ideas of the surface duo were great and I’m super excited to see them evolved and shipped in a product that I think a lot of people are going to love.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Fired it up to check my own app (RunnerCast) and it looks fine. The Liquid Glass menu moves from the bottom to the right side automatically both on the inner and outer screens. If you already had a layout that worked for iOS and iPadOS, things adapt fine to the inside screen and when you go split screen with two apps, the layout adapts nicely. I don't think I'll need to do a thing.
I've also noticed a flurry of recent app updates from some of the bigger apps (MLB, NYTimes, etc.) to switch to the Liquid Glass menu which I assume Apple strongly suggested they do prior to the Duo launch.
It’s really interesting to note how the bigger apps deferred adopting Liquid Glass altogether until iOS 26 is out for almost a year. Do most developers making large apps also loathe it? Do they have in-house designers telling them not to adopt it?
It’s a lot of work
It breaks most design languages. It’s not a neutral element.
Interestingly, Instagram decided to implement a custom liquid-glass like tab bar which surely now turns to be a PITA.
It also happens to look ugly AF. Even WhatsApp gets it right.
iOS 27 SDK will ignore the liquid glass compatibility flag, so the developers are now being forced to adopt it, unless they choose to stay with an old SDK version and all the hassle it brings.
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/832710?answerId=89...
Most apps people actually use will look fine because there's a team of mobile devs in all big companies who get paid to keep up with Apple breaking their apps every year with their 'updates' (among other things).
I mean, don't expect advanced features like consistent smooth scrolling, non-broken UI, absence of animation flickers, cloud sync that works consistently even for paid apps developed by Apple or anybody else but other than that :)
This is the first time we get an iPhone skew that is significantly different and with no sales track record.
For instance, very few company bothered to do anything for the Vision Pro. Now we'll see if Google or Microsoft for instance see the iPhone Duo as a main line product or an exotic offshoot that needs to prove itself before any money is spent on it.
In plenty of big companies one month is not even enough time to get a new release into production, let alone test and fix the layouts.
You're right.
My brain must have blocked out the 'cadence' (oh the corpo speak!) of corporate dev out of self preservation.
None seem to be working at Meta.
How many years has it been for them to release an upscaled (zero extra features!) version of instagram and whatsapp for iPad?
Two of the most used apps in the world
Apps that support iPad are 95% fine unless you do crazy custom things (which Apple has been telling developers for decades now that they shouldn’t do), and apps that are phone only are letterboxed, but still entirely usable.
How many customers do you expect to be running on Duo for the first year of its existence?
I’d be surprised if it was >0.01% for anyone. Apple wants you to drop everything to support all the bells and whistles for their new device, but even if you take 3 months to fix minor layout bugs, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.
I have friends who dropped everything to support the Vision Pro, and I don’t think any of them felt like it was worth it in retrospect. Even the ones that got featured by Apple as a result didn’t see more than a few thousand downloads.
How do you figure? Assume the average Apple cell phone replacement cycle is somewhere between 3 and 4 years. At the longer end, you’d need the sell-through rate of the Duo compared to other phones to be less than 0.04% to hit your number. We know from the Mini and other phones that Apple tends to avoid designs that it expects to have less than a 5% sell rate, two orders of magnitude higher. Even if you assume they’re aiming for 5% of dollars instead of units, and you take into account the non-Apple market (which certainly should not be unit-weighted for folks thinking about app revenue), you’re off by well over an order of magnitude.
If he is off by an order of magnitude and it's 0.1% still no developer (unless a fanboy) should bother
Although maybe they should because someone willing to buy a $2000 phone on launch is probably more willing to buy a lot more things versus someone who keeps phones a long time.
Why? If you’re spending 2000 hours a year servicing your current customers, surely it’s worth 20 hours to add on 1%, even ignoring that that 1% is probably more valuable than your average customer, and the halo effect of giving a good experience to existing users migrating devices.
What does being a ‘fanboy’ mean in this context?
Apple does many crazy custom things in their own apps. Their advice is not sacrosanct. It just means you must prepare for less notice than they had if you want to compete with the frontier UI aspects that Apple apps achieve.
They should remember that they got quite a bit of social capital within Apple by doing that and hopefully they're keeping those relationships warm. But yeah Vision Pro hasn't turned out to be a big ecosystem so far.
That social capital and $5 will buy me a cup of coffee.
Because Apple has always treated its developers so well!
Vision Pro will be cancelled at some point, it’s just nowhere near popular enough and never will be - the air has gone out of that VR bubble.
I wouldn’t be surprised if duo is also cancelled because it is another copycat move which is not central to Apples business and will not be mass market.
It's going to be mass market and I wouldn't be surprised if it sells out on launch day in the US.
Based on what? At that price tag, I doubt it will be mass market, but perhaps I’m wrong.
Usually just compiling with the new SDK will get apps basic support if they have been following Apple standards.
The VP was a niche device for a niche market. Phones are not that. I think the Duo will do very well. The one knock are the cameras do not match the Pro. I don't think will care though.
How is that possible? iPhones have had varying screen sizes for more than a decade, how could any app still have a fixed size?
There are many. We have an online supermarket with an app (Picnic) who don't support iPad, don't support landscape, don't support dark mode, etc.
I bet it's due to product managers not caring about those.
Because despite Apple having clear guidelines a huge number of developers think their 'custom UI' is what customers really want. When they don't. The best apps use system components and follow the HIG. Always have, always will. Your custom tab bar is stupid.
Unless Apple uses their stick (whip, or whatever else) to drive the developer community, I bet iOS will experience the same app fragmentation as Android does regarding various form factors, more so than between iPad, iPhone and iWatch already.
I don’t think it'll be "most apps".
Apple all but told developers in June [1] to update their apps not to assume a fixed screen size.
One of the apps Apple's engineers demonstrate new features was called Origami [2]. When I watched the video, it seemed pretty clear: a device that folds was in our future.
If you’re a developer that's kept up with the latest iOS developments, you'll be in good shape for the Duo.
But if you're up to your eyeballs in technical debt using deprecated frameworks and APIs… it's probably gonna be a while for you.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/278
[2]: "Modernize your UIKit app" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origami
Also, every iPad has a full window server. So any app that was available for iPad, should've been resizable in any shape.
Apple also bundles a /uikit-app-modernization skill which should help with adopting layouts to iPhone Duo.
Apple’s Developer Documentation is historically pretty terrible. So I’d be curious to see if they stepped it up for the agent instructions for the new API’s.
Depends on how far back you go.
Apple's current docs suck, and they have, for a long time (SwiftUI was so bad, that someone came up with this[0], and it was a lifesaver).
But I'm old enough to remember Inside Macintosh[1], and that was a thing of beauty.
Apple used to take technical documentation very seriously. Many of their technical writers had better tech chops, than the engineers making the stuff they wrote about.
[0] https://swiftui-lab.com
[1] https://vintageapple.org/inside_o/
I really wish they still did, instead of focusing so much on trying to make it simple and obvious like in SwiftUI. Objective-C was a pinnacle of computing, and ever since Swift they've been devolving into the pursuit of oversimplifying and abstracting away the details such that they don't even feel necessary to teach anymore, even though as a new developer, I WANT TO KNOW THEM.
Historically it was very good. Back when I was writing Mac and iOS apps in objective-c, Apple's docs were some of the best.
Thanks for Axiom, looks useful. Does it already cover the new 27.1 beta APIs?
Looks like Safari 27.1 on Duo ships without support for CSS viewport segments and any other CSS or JS to handle foldables.
I'm not a webdev, is that surprising? Or is it more something that you would have wanted or expected?
Certainly, these aren't new standards and have been available on Android. We like to offer a split page when a foldable is used in a book pose and avoid having anything (especially interactive elements) in the middle.
I started adding support for iPhone Duo in some of my apps. Here's an example of some of the work required https://mastodon.social/@simsaens/117296064810231465 — all my apps are hobby apps. Even though they all support iPad / resizability, it's still a large amount of work
I've been testing with Xcode 27.1 on the Duo simulator and I was pleasantly surprised that nearly everything worked well, untouched. The main thing I need a real device for is knowing which buttons are easier or harder to press on the right edge, but using modern UIKit this was not that difficult. That, and taking advantage of the left/right inner display content areas.