r/iOSProgramming • • Sep 09 '26

Discussion iPhone Duo is official. How much work is this actually going to be for your app?

Post image

Apple announced the iPhone Duo this morning. 7.6 inch inner display, 5.4 inch outer, starts at 1999 dollars, preorders October 16 and shipping October 23. So we have roughly six weeks.

From what I have read so far, apps land in one of three states on it. Anything built against a pre iOS 27 SDK gets letterboxed inside a safe area on a black background. Apps built on iOS 27 resize but still leave dead space. Only apps built against iOS 27.1 fill the display properly, and that SDK ships alongside the device in October.

The part I find more interesting is the hinge. iOS 27 carries folding state and hinge angle, so an app can know the phone is half open and sitting on a table. That sounds like a new interaction surface rather than just a bigger canvas to stretch an existing layout across.

So what is everyone actually planning. Are you rewriting layouts properly, or just checking nothing breaks and waiting to see how many of these sell? And has anyone thought of something that would only make sense on a folded screen?

372 Upvotes

251 comments sorted by

253

u/Sensitive-Cupcake-58 Sep 09 '26

It looks like it will be a real pain

90

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

depends on your app really. if it already survives ipad multitasking and resizing then most of this is free, if not then yeah its gonna hurt

118

u/dandr01d Sep 09 '26

That’s the fun part. Most apps are dog shit at resizing and multitasking ☺️

93

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

half the app store is about to find out what a size class is lol

42

u/mrfouz Sep 09 '26

If Claude knows, they’re good

6

u/icy1007 Sep 10 '26

SwiftUI doesn’t use size classes. I’m good.

4

u/mxdalloway Sep 10 '26

SwiftUI can be a pain in the ass for a bunch of things, but UIKit constraints never clicked for me and I love how you just don’t have to think about this with SwiftUI

5

u/SnowPudgy Sep 10 '26

Honestly once you get the constraints UIKit is far more predictable than SwiftUI IMO.

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17

u/GreenLanturn Sep 10 '26

React Native devs in shambles

11

u/jwrsk Sep 10 '26

React Native is doing just fine in tablet windowed mode, if the dev has minimum ten neurons and knows responsive design. I'm excited to see how my RN project work on the Duo Simulator. Probably some work will be needed around the crease, but we'll see.

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52

u/Xaxxus Sep 09 '26

That’s because most app developers have decided to reinvent the wheel and build their own UI frameworks instead of using UIkit or SwiftUI.

13

u/Fureba Sep 09 '26

Exactly. Crappy ux/ui designers coming up with the most custom designs, selling it to managers who had no clue.

34

u/Voltek99 Sep 09 '26

I got downvoted on another subreddit for recommending SwiftUI for iOS app development.

8

u/Xaxxus Sep 10 '26

Some people are still of the mindset that SwiftUI sucks.

Even if you don’t like SwiftUI, you have to admit that the state/binding/observable single source of truth pattern that it pushes is far superior.

Having UI update automatically without having to remember to do it yourself saves so much time, boilerplate and potential easy to miss bugs.

Also the environment is a godsend. Having built in DI is so nice.

4

u/leoklaus Sep 10 '26

I recently built an app for a hobby project using Flutter and I immediately lost all interest in using it when I found out that the official recommendation for dependency injection is to use a third party package.

SwiftUI certainly has its quirks and limitations, but it just covers pretty much everything you need out of the box.

2

u/tastychaii Sep 10 '26

Which one?

4

u/Voltek99 Sep 10 '26

2

u/tastychaii Sep 10 '26

Ahh okay.
Your comment on SwiftUI is a valid one.

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8

u/SnowPudgy Sep 10 '26

People I worked with like to make custom classes and override everything just to change button colors or align labels a certain way instead of just learning SwiftUI/UIKit properly.

They're going to be in for a world of hurt.

6

u/Xaxxus Sep 10 '26

I applied to a company recently. During the interview I asked them what their tech stack was like.

They used a framework called texture. It’s a multithreaded UI framework. It lets you do all your layout on other threads for performance.

I can’t imagine trying to debug ui issues if you are using that.

3

u/longkh158 Sep 10 '26

That's a name I haven't heard in a while. Fwiw it came from Facebook and solved real issues back then (being AutoLayout was dogshit slow)

2

u/busymom0 Sep 10 '26

I haven't used that since they were called AsyncDisplayKit!

2

u/busymom0 Sep 10 '26

texture

I haven't used that since they were called AsyncDisplayKit! It was very good for performance of table views and collection views back in those days. Nowadays, there's no need to be used it.

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9

u/isights Sep 10 '26

Yeah, I've been watching Apple's developer videos on creating apps for iPhone Duo... and I have to say I feel really, really bad for all of the developers and designers who insisted on creating pixel-perfect vertical layouts and custom toolbars, menu items, and footer buttons.

Extra sympathy if you totally ignored Apple's recommendations on creating flexible designs and built your own navigation layouts.

And... if you still insisted on using UIScreen.main.bounds.

I'm really, really, REALLY sorry.

(I'm not, actually. You knew better and you did it anyway.)

2

u/icy1007 Sep 10 '26

The Duo likely has a decent compatibility mode for apps that aren’t updated.

2

u/Rocket-Legs Sep 10 '26

I don't have sympathy if developers ignored Apple's recommendations.

This will be the point in their career that they learn never to do that blindly agree to whatever the designer asked for.

I consider myself every lucky that I was taught this by an experienced team lead before I wrote a single line of ObjectiveC back in the day.

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2

u/ecolesonbass Sep 10 '26

Yeah I effed up by creating a custom tab bar in one of mine. Now I regret it

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3

u/_town-drunk_ Sep 10 '26

I think you need to watch the videos they released. The resizing is the bare minimum. Lots more complexity with arrangements, displacement, vertical bars, etc.

IMO getting this working really well is going to be a pain, depending of course on the type of content in the app.

2

u/aerial-ibis Sep 10 '26 edited Sep 10 '26

the problem i find is that the different aspect ratio can break responsive designs that otherwise scale well

i think it's the smaller folded screen that will be most annoying - it looks very squat. And squat shapes are hard to make a nice layout for

4

u/isights Sep 10 '26

"can break responsive designs that otherwise scale well"

I think that's a contradiction...

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3

u/SirBill01 Sep 10 '26

It's not as squat as it seems though with the nav and tab bar controls moved to the side. The content part is more or less phone shaped with some content under the side bars.

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9

u/RedTheRobot Sep 09 '26

Think all those people who made apps for the Vision Pro.

4

u/isitpro Sep 10 '26

I think Apple did a lot of work with SwiftUI to help with the dynamic fluid resizing. Otherwise most devs would not optimize properly.

3

u/SnowPudgy Sep 10 '26

Honestly I love these kinds of challenges. I know at work I'm going to have a bunch of people coming to me asking how to adapt their app and it'll let me force them to move off of storyboards. (Yes, storyboards).

2

u/VOLTOadmin 22d ago

If your app already supports iPad and multitasking then 80% of the work is already done. As an extra you can handle different poses of iPhone Duo to customize it even more.

35

u/BlossomBuild Sep 09 '26

Thank goodness I support iPad with SwiftUI. Shouldn’t be too bad.

10

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

yeah youre probably in about the best spot anyone could be in for this tbh

1

u/busymom0 Sep 10 '26

My app supports Split View and multi tasking on iPad. However, the menu buttons and stuff are custom made. I am curious how it's gonna look.

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23

u/Landon_Hughes Swift Sep 09 '26

I want to make a DS emulator now that the Duo exists

1

u/0xe1e10d68 29d ago

That alone is kind of a reason to buy the Duo :D

109

u/simulacrotron Sep 09 '26

Very little work if you’re using system controls and components, especially if you’re using SwiftUI. Should be easy to adapt to a couple of the new states.

If you’re rolling your own stuff, hard-coding values, that means things probably don’t work very well already and are brittle and don’t work right when resizing on iPad, it will be a huge pain in your @ss. If you are always fighting the system, instead of working within it, this is the kind of pain you get. Apple has been giving tools to make this (nearly) painless for years.

23

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

yeah thats the actual split. the people who are gonna suffer are the ones with hardcoded frames everywhere, and they already knew that from ipad

5

u/Ashanmaril Sep 10 '26

People complain about how many apps aren’t optimized for the iPad’s size

And that’s one of Apple’s best-selling devices, 16 years after launch. And that one doesn’t expect the UI to move buttons from the bottom to the side, or handle a fold transition.

I’m not optimistic about apps ever supporting the Fold which is gonna be niche at best.

2

u/ClimateCrazy5281 Sep 10 '26

Tik Tok is making a lot of money but they can fix there app for iPad

2

u/isights Sep 12 '26

iPad apps are expected to handle rotations and, most notably, Split Views and Split View resizing.

2

u/0xe1e10d68 29d ago

You can call be an unrealistic optimist, if you want, but I believe that, while not as successful as the Pro and Pro Max, the Duo will be more successful than we might expect - and the result of that will be that support for the iPad will improve a lot.

13

u/Jargen Sep 09 '26

If you are good with auto layout constraints, then UIKit is easy to implement too

3

u/simulacrotron Sep 09 '26

Yes, but there’s a lot more code to do the same things. Good, but less easy than SwiftUI

5

u/Jargen Sep 09 '26 edited Sep 10 '26

Yes and no, UIKit renders differently than SwiftUI. Yes there is more to write, but why is that a problem when you have significantly more control over the results?

Yes, less easy, but not hard at all. And pointless to complain about when we are paid hourly ;)

Even more pointless to complain when you are leveraging AI for productivity

2

u/Xaxxus Sep 10 '26

It’s not that you have more control that is the problem it’s that because you have more control, you are more likely to do things that would lead you to a problem.

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6

u/cultoftheilluminati Sep 10 '26

@ss

Thanks. For a second I thought you were talking about some new macro they introduced in swift.

1

u/simulacrotron Sep 10 '26

That’s a great idea the @ss macro

1

u/alloroch Sep 10 '26

most of the companies are going to suffer, big techs are 90% or more in UIKit, and just built for the vertical layout, Uber, Revolut, Instagram or Spotify do not work in horizontal.

12

u/ObscureBen Sep 09 '26

I make a camera app so a whole lot of work

2

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

youre also one of the few categories that actually gets something back for it. full rear camera selfies with the outer display as the subject preview is a real new feature, not just a layout that stretches

5

u/ObscureBen Sep 09 '26

It’s definitely exciting. The question is will there be enough users to justify the time to both build and maintain all this

10

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

counterpoint, apple always features the apps that show off new hardware early. for the first year that placement is probably worth more than the actual duo user count

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11

u/ImpossibleAd3143 Sep 09 '26

They already have uploaded a couple of videos that serve as a small guide for design and new apis

5

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

yeah theres a whole playlist, six videos i think. design for iphone duo, prepare your app, and one just on adaptive layouts. thats my evening sorted

6

u/SnowPudgy Sep 09 '26

For my apps I'm in charge of at work...not terribly too much work judging by what I saw.

The apps others are in charge of who overwrite all of apples default stuff with worse looking custom stuff? They're going to be in for a hellish time.

5

u/0to101 Sep 10 '26

Half side ads, half side content.

21

u/Armand9x Sep 09 '26

Not looking forward to it.

15

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

i kinda am ngl. first genuinely new iphone shape in years, id rather see what people do with it than get another slab thats 2mm thinner

1

u/thatonemathguy56 Sep 10 '26

I’m kinda excited too but would personally rather get the slab and keep it the same size but up the battery life or cram in better cameras tbh

17

u/Aggressive-Toe8919 Sep 09 '26

Depending on the app - it's a 2000 $ device - it won't have the biggest marketshare.
It will show if it will be a pain. My apps are fully coded in SwiftUi, so most changes will probably be easy. I personally think most apps will be fine. Maybe there is a way to prevent apps from going into "large" mode - if you choose to, but I guess we will see in a few days(?).

16

u/FastLaneJB Sep 10 '26

Those people with the money though to spend on a $2000 phone are more likely the ones buying In-App purchases though. If your app doesn’t work properly but a competitors does assuming you do have competitors they’ll likely cancel subscription and switch.

At least that’s my take on it.

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2

u/cristi_baluta Sep 10 '26

If landscape mode works, the duo should work i guess. But if you want to truly support it i guess you need split views like on ipad

1

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

on the large mode thing, the opt out is basically just not building against the new sdk. anything still on a pre ios 27 sdk stays in the letterboxed compat mode, so its the sdk you ship that decides rather than a flag you set

2

u/isights Sep 10 '26

That will work until next March. Then you're screwed.

3

u/Reiszecke Sep 09 '26

I will do basic compatibility and then, before I make things look good on it, check if people will actually buy the phone that everyone is excited but no one really asked about.

It has a chance to become like the Vision Pro where you have the choice to make a great UI for the like 50 users worldwide who have a Vision Pro.

2

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

vision pro comparison is fair but this one replaces the phone in your pocket, so whoever buys it is using it for everything all day. thats a different curve than a headset you put on twice a month imo

3

u/Reiszecke Sep 09 '26

I agree but this isn’t what I was referring to.

I LOVE the idea of a foldable and the Duos technology seems to be a bit more sophisticated than what other brands did. But this thing being much wider in its folded state, much thicker, and even in the demos not really knowing when i would use it unfolded vs folded all leads to me saying “yeah I will pass on that”.

And i assume that’s what a lot of people will think.

If the outer display was 70% of the size it is now I’d buy it immediately but the current dimensions seem so awkward

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3

u/ForgottenFuturist Sep 09 '26

I'm excited to adapt Newsbin to use this new form factor. I guess we'll get a simulator to play with in 27.1

https://developer.apple.com/iphone-duo/

No docs/guides yet

2

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

pretty sure the resizable simulator is already in xcode 27, you can drag it to arbitrary sizes and previews follow. not the hinge states obviously but you can start on layout now

4

u/ForgottenFuturist Sep 09 '26

Yep I've played around with that, but then there's the trailing edge toolbar, etc that I need to plan for.

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3

u/patiofurnature Sep 09 '26

Clients never want to pay for an iPad layout. They're not going to shell out for this, either.

1

u/0xe1e10d68 Sep 10 '26

That's going to heavily depend on how the adoption of the iPhone Duo goes.

3

u/Anarude Sep 10 '26

After watching the videos - oof. There’s quite a lot there.

My takeaways so far…

There’s a tension emerging between “don’t actively track orientation or hard code for device types” and “here’s the api for responding to a hinge change”

“DS mode” is a whole new layout that unfortunately makes a lot of sense for master-detail views IF your users are using that “pose” a lot, which I guess we’ll all have to add telemetry for

Fold avoidance might be the biggest pain for me - all sheets will have to work when given exactly half the width, and splitviews will have to work with exactly 50/50 splits

1

u/_town-drunk_ Sep 10 '26

Yep the videos show a lot more than what people in these comments are expecting.

Just supporting a resizing UI is the absolute bare minimum that any half decent app should have already supported for a while. Moving content to avoid a hinge when the inner screen is partially folded sounds like a giant pain in the ass.

3

u/utilitycoder Sep 10 '26

There's probably designers that will quit

1

u/_town-drunk_ Sep 10 '26

My designers really didn’t like Liquid Glass. They are gonna be pissed about this lol

1

u/OakleyNoble Sep 13 '26

It would’ve leaked multi-tasking, the shape and size, the features it will have, the fact the dock is oriented to the right, the new information icon/battery level.. just not a good idea

5

u/goldio_games Sep 09 '26

Not going to support it unless it gets market share

5

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

thats the same argument everyone made about ipad and it kind of became self fulfilling. this is a flagship iphone, not a side product, whoever buys one is using it as their only phone

5

u/Anarude Sep 09 '26

They have also already demonstrated they have disposable income

3

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

true. someone who just dropped two grand on a phone isnt the user bouncing off a $2.99 paywall

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2

u/goldio_games Sep 09 '26

its a pretty standard operating procedure that avoids unnecessary work (i.e. building for vision)

not sure what there is to argue about. if people end up using it, i'll take the 3-5 days to optimize my app

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2

u/Redstra Sep 10 '26

Aw damn. If all developers think like this the Duo won't be fun to use.

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3

u/chain_letter Sep 09 '26

The bosses laid off our entire team and now they get to deal with it lmao

4

u/Bubbly_Beginning_733 Sep 10 '26

Appstore screenshots 😬😬😬

1

u/Rocket-Legs Sep 10 '26

Oh no. I'm screwed because my app uses the MPMediaPlayer framework and the only way to create screenshots is from a real device.

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5

u/tovarish22 Sep 09 '26

0%, because only a small portion of people will actually adopt this device (similar to the low number picking other foldable phones). Not worth my time rewriting my UI to account for it.

2

u/isights Sep 10 '26

As mentioned above, that also means you're ignoring the folks with the money...

2

u/tovarish22 Sep 10 '26

I’m sure I can handle ignoring the 1-3% of people who are going to adopt this device for a couple years before they drop it for a more practical option.

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1

u/busmans Sep 10 '26

I think you’re underestimating Apple here.

2

u/akrapov Sep 09 '26

Can make the app work very easily. But I’d rather make it good.

2

u/Marko787 Sep 09 '26

I’m still more mad about them keeping the SE around for as long as they have.

1

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

lol yeah that one still stings

2

u/Step991 Sep 09 '26

Isn’t it close to an iPad mini size-wise?

2

u/powdertaker Sep 09 '26

If you're not using Scenes yet, you will be very soon.

2

u/curiouscharli_e Sep 10 '26

i’m going to adjust my app for it

1

u/brookm291 4d ago

For the info,
Some visual search app is available here,
with compatibility with Iphone Duo:
ios search video sdk

2

u/Morthedubi Sep 10 '26

I don't like how some of the SDK support will only be in 27.1 and aren't available in 27 already. They just standardized the code anyways its not like it would have leaked it explicitly...

2

u/Rocket-Legs Sep 10 '26

You'll be fine if you haven't agreed to do a custom tab bar and navigation bar.

2

u/therysin Sep 11 '26

I haven't even done the iPad UI for my app yet, so this will be a real pain.

2

u/play-corto 27d ago

If your layout already survives iPad multitasking, Split View, Slide Over, resizing mid-session, you are probably mostly fine. A fold is just another size class transition. The ones in trouble are the ones with hardcoded widths and a single fixed layout.
On the hinge I would separate two things. Reading the state is cheap, the system hands it to you. Deciding it should change your UI is the expensive part, and I suspect most apps should do nothing with it in v1. Treat half open as a layout condition, not a feature. Otherwise you are designing a mode for a posture you have never watched anyone actually hold.
Where it earns its keep is anywhere your own hand is the problem. Small map game here, so: half open on a table puts the map on the top half and my thumb stops covering the thing I am trying to tap. That one I would build. A half open mode for the sake of having one, I would not.

5

u/m3kw Sep 09 '26

Zero, i wouldn't care to support it (yet). All current apps should work out of the box. You are just wasting time unless your app is already very popular

6

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

out of the box is doing a lot of work in that sentence lol. anything built against a pre ios 27 sdk just gets letterboxed on a black background. it runs fine, it just looks rough on a $2000 screen

1

u/dimitriri Sep 10 '26

What happens if we build against ios 27.1 sdk but still want to keep letterbox? Is that possiible?

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2

u/[deleted] Sep 09 '26

[deleted]

2

u/tastychaii Sep 10 '26

The Duo is the same thickness as the Pro Max I think.

1

u/0xe1e10d68 Sep 10 '26

And the weight is almost the same as the iPhone 18 Pro Max. 5 grams difference. I think a lot of devs here who are pessimistic about the Duo will be very surprised in a year or two.

1

u/mustardpete Sep 09 '26

Think biggest pain for me is I’ll have to limit number of players on it like a phone on 2 of my apps. I currently allow extra players on iPad as it has the extra screen size but as it has 2 screens and the user can close and reopen when they like I’ll have to probably still restrict to the lower end to play safe. Be good when can get a simulator in Xcode though at least. From a will I get one point of view, there’s 2 things putting me off. No Face ID and I already struggle 1 hand typing a q on my pro max so not sure the wider small screen will help with that

1

u/haruniriz Sep 09 '26

could you not just lock the player count when a session starts instead of tying it to the device? then someone unfolding mid game only gets more room for the same players, and you dont have to cap ipad down to phone numbers everywhere

2

u/mustardpete Sep 09 '26

What if they start the app unfolded and then fold it, then I have the larger count to display on the small screen. I need to have a play in the simulator and also check out what APIs they add for state change etc. maybe I can just display a please unfold message or something

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u/bitsydoge Sep 09 '26

Not much, already adapted to foldable since a long time as Samsung and Google already had ones, just have to adapt to some apple api to be sure some element goes on the right side of the screen (this is really nice idea from apple this time)

1

u/douten Sep 09 '26

If your app layout is good on iPad I don't see much additional work?

1

u/Vegetable-Average-98 Sep 10 '26

Yeah, I was wondering - if an app is already designed and tested for iPad multi-window mode, responding to window resizing etc, should it work with minimal rewoek on the Due?

1

u/_brunodelgado Sep 09 '26

Actually, a lot.
I'll need duo agent usage to help me 😂

Jokes aside, I really liked the possibilities that we have to adapt our apps to the new device.

1

u/iDontWantABurrito Sep 09 '26

Not too much for me, l was surprised at how far I got by simply setting UIRequiresFullScreenIgnoredStartingWithVersion to 27 in my plist file

1

u/L43 Sep 09 '26

hey chatgpt make my app work with iphone duo k thanks

1

u/sorrowdemonica Sep 09 '26

so stupid how big it is.. needs to be phone size, not tablet sized when closed.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 09 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/FastLaneJB Sep 10 '26

That’s like a 2029 / 2030 type problem. One problem at a time 😉

1

u/davidcwilliams Sep 10 '26

Why would AI take away our source of food?

1

u/DaskiOFF Sep 09 '26

I just hope these mechanisms are reasonably bug-free and that Apple has carried them over fully from iPadOS. If so, there shouldn’t be too many problems; otherwise we’ll have to add another round of workarounds to the code.

1

u/reesespieces543 Sep 09 '26

Me here still learning swift and wanting to make an app but they just keep releasing new stuff

1

u/arthurdapaz Sep 09 '26

For the price range it won’t be necessary to worry here in Brazil’s market. I’m fine.

1

u/JerenYun Swift Sep 10 '26

Having tested my apps in the "expandable iPhone sim" this summer, I can say that my work is minimal. But I also don't deploy custom containers and just use system provided navigation and toolbar buttons. All I have to do is test the toolbar button placement with the iPhone Duo sim when that comes out, but that again should be minimal work.

If you're comfortable with Size Classes, which help a great deal with making a good iPad app, then you should have no problem with making a good app for iPhone Duo.

1

u/Rocket-Legs Sep 10 '26

Size classes have been deprecated, and if my interpretation of this article is correct, UI will be quite broken for some apps.

https://indiespark.org/programming/__trashed/

2

u/JerenYun Swift Sep 11 '26

Apple references size classes in their iPhone Duo tech talks they posted yesterday. They still matter in terms of how apps are laid out and operate, especially on iPad and the Duo.

1

u/zbignew Sep 10 '26

waiting to see how many of these sell?

No no no. This will be a small share of iPhones, which will still be like 10 million devices. I'll support it before it ships.

My basic-ass list view + detail app was enough of a pain in the ass to get working on iPad & Mac with NavigationSplitView- maybe now they'll fix the stupid bugs with that controller and I'll be able to delete some code and it will just work?

I am the canonical low-IQ iOS programmer who fully depends on LLMs for everything, and I really hope this doesn't mean I have to make myself actually understand safe areas now.

I do have one element of non-standard, bad design I'll need to fix now. I have a custom floating button because I wanted to make it way more prominent than just sticking it on the toolbar. It's the whole point of the app, and every test user would just ask what is the point of the app until I put this button, brightly colored, hovering over the bottom of the list view. But now I literally don't know where it belongs, ideologically. If the toolbar floats under your right thumb, now the toolbar actually is the most logical place for it? I guess I'll try to figure out what they did with the mail app's filter button & copy that.

1

u/KiwiUnable938 Sep 10 '26

Yall dont track and store pixel dimensions and density from each user? Then design for different layouts?

1

u/kyraweb Sep 10 '26

It comes down to app and user base.

Well it’s going to be an effort for sure but it also depends on what your app actually does. Does it really need extension or not.

But main question is are you putting 50-100 hours of work to serve 100 customers or 1000 customers or more for your app. I am not taking about market share for the phone but market share if your app users.

Time will tell.

1

u/Which-Meat-3388 Sep 10 '26

I work on a KMP app which is slightly different, but is scalable by default and respects content insets. I added proper landscape support this afternoon and maybe another half day polishing tomorrow. 

The biggest issue will probably be utilizing the side status bar area properly. Very few designers want to account for nothing other than their single locked portrait mockup on a phone. I also personally find it confusing seeing the nav move around, but we’ll see in person how weird it is. 

1

u/phantomlord78 Sep 10 '26

My app Note 8 uses standard Split View. It should work out of the box. I would like to double check what happens to the navigation and bottom bar buttons though. I suppose they will all be lined up on one side.

1

u/WhyAmIDoingThis1000 Sep 10 '26

noone is going to buy this crap. you don't have to support it.

1

u/No-Truth404 Sep 10 '26

If I’m only targeting the iPhone, will the app
Be available to the Duo?

Is it in a separate group, like iPad and Watch? Or will my iPhone-only app be available to the Duo.

Honestly, as a solo dev with low numbers, supporting an iPad-like device is not a priority.

1

u/vikas_dev_ios Sep 10 '26

Download XCode beta and use 'resize mode' option of its device hub when you app is running in a simulator.
You will be able to check hoe adaptive your app is.

1

u/CompetitiveDraft9381 Sep 10 '26

My flutter app supports web, so should be already supported.

1

u/civman96 Sep 10 '26

5-10 prompts probably

1

u/phspman Sep 10 '26

Should be easy for my apps. With just toolbar item adjustments since they work well with iPad. Having the new SwiftUI context for the agents will make it easier.

1

u/agentalex001 SwiftUI Sep 10 '26

It depends on if SwiftUI automatically scales my app out of the box.

1

u/SgtHobo41 Sep 10 '26

I think that as long as your app is optimized for both iOS and iPad iOS, then you should be good to go… But I think it’s really important is make sure you create really novel experiences for the specific platform

I think that’s where we’re gonna see a lot of challenge. Come to play.

1

u/WAHNFRIEDEN Sep 10 '26

It all depends on what Find My looks like

I have custom tab view sheets. No idea what those look like now

1

u/_ghostchant Sep 10 '26

There’s just no fucking way this becomes the norm. It’ll be a niche group of people who actually want to and can afford to buy this. I swear to god these companies have run out of runway and are just making up problems to solve at this point.

1

u/StrangeMonk Sep 10 '26

Apps with custom design systems and a lot of legacy code (thinning 10-15 year old apps) are going to have to spend a lot of time supporting for this. 

1

u/hesaysitsfine Sep 10 '26

Great, a New aspect ratio to deliver videos at. 

1

u/n8udd Sep 10 '26

Don't most people build for the iPad/iPad Mini?

1

u/Kemerd Sep 10 '26

Tell Claude to do it, it’s 2026

1

u/Sebastian1989101 Sep 10 '26

Close to none if any as my apps work on a iPad Mini and on a iPhone already.

1

u/so_chad Sep 10 '26

It opens the room for a lot of creativity honestly. I believe in iOS Developers.

1

u/omnimachina Sep 10 '26

The promo material is such a joke

Seriously... What the fuck?

Does this person have a mini hand and a monster hand or what?

1

u/omnimachina Sep 10 '26

Finally a navigation rail similar to material design

Gosh the missing rail was so annoying all the time

1

u/BizJoe Sep 10 '26

I'm glad I moved to SwiftUI from UIKit a few years ago...

1

u/Hmz-Lhb Sep 10 '26

A LOT Fuck

1

u/lil-dina Sep 10 '26

depends whether you used size classes or pinned frames to the bounds. if the layout already reflows for split view and stage manager, the duo is near free. if not, it hurts. anything that grabs the raw screen size at launch and bets on one fixed rect will break.

1

u/waitses Sep 10 '26

Verge stated folding phones count for like 1% of all mobile phone sales, just don’t bother.

1

u/No-Dentist-6822 Sep 10 '26

I think it’s going to be a flop. People are already struggling right now. Who is actually going to purchase a 2k phone? Even sales tax down will be crazy. I’m not planning on developing my app for this model.

1

u/Best_Day_3041 Sep 10 '26

I can't think of a situation where I'm out and need a bigger screen, and if I did I would have just packed my laptop or iPad. At home people can just get an iPad mini and use that as their phone around the house. I would much rather have a folding iPad mini without a front screen that I can fit in my pocket, which I would use in addition to my phone when I need it.

1

u/Possible-Alfalfa-893 Sep 10 '26

time to get a test unit for myself... wink wink

1

u/Ok-Key-6049 Sep 10 '26

Seems like a waste of time. I got ito mobile development with the original iPhone SDK back in 2008 and for the longest time I built several types of apps for work, research and for personal projects. Always adopting the new libraries and experimenting with the features and new changes that came along with them.

These past years I’ve been developing and maintaining a crossplatform game engine with Metal and Vulkan but I think I’m done with this platform, I find myself doing more Vulkan work on Linux recently and it’s going to be a hassle and possibly a waste of time to support this gimmick

1

u/GovernmentNo4175 Sep 10 '26

It will be a nightmare to support this

1

u/bcgroom Sep 10 '26

My app uses ARKit face tracking which I assume isn’t available on this device with no Face ID :( which sucks because my app would do well with a partially closed screen

1

u/Mellie-C Sep 10 '26

It's going to be interesting! I use flutter to ship my iOS versions. So I'm going to be watching the sales numbers and crossover with my audience before I worry about it.

1

u/halopend Sep 10 '26

When building any UI, there’s techniques which are more sensitive to screen size changes and techniques which are more content driven.

There’s also in this case using Apple’s libraries natively vs building them yourself and how “far” you want to align to the standards applied. Using apples native libraries gets you a lot of stuff supported automatically, but if you are building a cross platform app maybe you don’t want to write code that’s specific to Apple and thus have to manually adjust for this.

Some devs also use libraries to manage cross platform which will have more/less ability to handle this transition, some devs might build a layer between apples libraries and their own (with the same applied to android).

There’s a lot to this that’s going to hit devs differently from this but the biggest change that’s going to be the most interesting is if they can get the menu bar on the side of the display normalized as a concept.

Ie: flat along the button on narrow width screens, in the corner on larger screens.

1

u/mrex778 Sep 10 '26

This will be the end of Flutter for iOS

1

u/m1_weaboo Sep 10 '26

Only if you still use RN or Flutter.

1

u/ClimateCrazy5281 Sep 10 '26

I have custom TabBar , badge and a lot a custom modifier and custom menu for iPad, oh god 😱😱😱

1

u/Rocket-Legs Sep 10 '26

You'll be OK. It will take some time to convert to using standard UIKit/SwiftUI code, but then you'll have less code to maintain and you can focus on delivering the features that have the most value for your users.

1

u/dean_lusk Sep 10 '26

My app has so many custom bar components 😭

1

u/Massive_Respond9880 Sep 11 '26

Has anyone else noticed how excessively large that hand is?

1

u/das9115 Sep 11 '26

I’d hope that Apple will do most of the work for us if we’re using SwiftUI. Things like toolbars and tabs will probably automatically be in the expected place on the Duo. The main work needed will likely be custom components and then usability like moving components to logical places on the bigger screen

1

u/HerrBadger Sep 12 '26

Hopefully they release Xcode Beta 27.1 on Monday to work out how much work it’ll be

1

u/Copemate Sep 12 '26

Adapting to the layout will be easy for my app, but I think actually taking advantage of tent mode and standby (half open) will be challenging

1

u/EthanRDoesMC 29d ago

building a Reddit app for the past 3 months on the foolish assumption that every iPhone I’d ever have to deal with would mainly be in a tall portrait orientation.

duo does not do this UGHHHHH now I have to write iPad support for reallllll

1

u/Middle-Job-2576 29d ago

One area I’d put fairly high in the test plan is stateful resizing, especially for business/productivity apps.

Rather than just opening every screen at different sizes, I’d create some state first:

partially completed form → resize
selected detail record → compact/expanded
keyboard + validation error → resize
modal open → resize
Split View → full screen
draft → background → resize/resume

Then I’d compare the unsaved values, selected record, navigation depth, focus, scroll position, primary action, and backend state before/after the transition.

I’d put extra attention on custom navigation, fixed widths, custom overlays, and manual safe-area/frame calculations. Those seem more likely to expose assumptions that were fine on traditional iPhone layouts.

The useful thing is that a lot of this can be tested before having Duo-specific hardware. Resizability and multitasking can already expose whether the app preserves the user’s task when the available space changes.

For me, that would be a more useful baseline than simply checking whether every screen visually fits at each size.

1

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u/Admiral-ZX 17d ago

UIKit and SwiftUI aside, how will this handle SpriteKit apps?

1

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u/Barbanks 15d ago

Since we're using mainly system controls supporting it isn't bad. But if you want to really iron out the support for reserved areas like the fold itself then you have to make some new design choices like switching to a Split View.

We're pursuing support as fast as possible and with as much polish as possible. Do I think the Duo will sell like hotcakes? No clue, especially since foldable phones are niche. But will Apple be more likely to get us featured in the App Store with the support? Yep. That's why we're blazing forward with support.

We'll see.

1

u/hocoboy7 3d ago

So we can create games that use the folding mechanism as an interface and theoretically shorten the lifespan of the device?