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.
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.
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.
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.
I believe there is a large market of consumers in the US who can afford a $2000 premium phone compared to the $1300 iPhone Pro Max.
In China, reportedly JD.com's Apple store received more than 1.13 million registrations of interest for the Duo, at a starting price of ~$2400.
I could be wrong also, but I wouldn't be surprised if the iPhone Duo sells like hot cakes.
I could imagine that premium smartphone buyers, instead of upgrading their phones for minor camera and battery improvements, go for the device that unfolds into a tablet.
Yeah I think East Asia will drive alot here. That's where the large screen phone trend started as well. I'm also suspect of a $2k phone that also has had to make a number of compromises to support the new format. But the market will tell us who's right and it was worth it for Apple to try. If they fail it's really not the end of the world and they can pivot back to traditional form factors or find another.
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 is so bad, that someone came up with this[0], and it's 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.
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.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 43.7 ms ] threadHere 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 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.
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.
And that means nothing. Because other manufacturers are not doing well either.
I’m not doubting that there’s demand for it but I wonder who/where?
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.
Resources:
https://developer.apple.com/search/?q=iphone%20duo
Axiom: https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ (my FOSS project, updated for iPhone Duo)
I don't think they won't work, but I anticipate oddities to appear for a while, especially for older applications.
I assume other apps will have have the same, since our team is super small compared to everyone else.
I expect that most apps will look rather broken on release, but it will be smoothed out eventually.
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.
Interestingly, Instagram decided to implement a custom liquid-glass like tab bar which sure now turns to be a PITA.
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/832710?answerId=89...
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 :)
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.
My brain must have blocked out the 'cadence' (oh the corpo speak!) of corporate dev out of self preservation.
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
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.
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.
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.
I believe there is a large market of consumers in the US who can afford a $2000 premium phone compared to the $1300 iPhone Pro Max.
In China, reportedly JD.com's Apple store received more than 1.13 million registrations of interest for the Duo, at a starting price of ~$2400.
I could be wrong also, but I wouldn't be surprised if the iPhone Duo sells like hot cakes.
I could imagine that premium smartphone buyers, instead of upgrading their phones for minor camera and battery improvements, go for the device that unfolds into a tablet.
> 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.
How is that possible? iPhones have had varying screen sizes for more than a decade, how could any app still have a fixed size?
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
Depends on how far back you go.
Apple's current docs suck, and they have, for a long time (SwiftUI is so bad, that someone came up with this[0], and it's 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/
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.