Xcode 27.1 Beta Release Notes
developer.apple.com
developer.apple.com
I expect that most apps will look rather broken on release, but it will be smoothed out eventually.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 bet it's due to product managers not caring about those.
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 surely now turns to be a PITA.
https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/832710?answerId=89...
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
My brain must have blocked out the 'cadence' (oh the corpo speak!) of corporate dev out of self preservation.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
As a professional programmer, it at least gratifies me to know this is the attitude I'm competing against.
I'm not an iOS developer, never made an app at all, I asked because I'm curious. What is it really to gain?
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.
And my point is more about us as individuals. As a user I want better apps. As a developer I care about doing things well, which translates directly into career success.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Resources:
https://developer.apple.com/search/?q=iphone%20duo
Axiom: https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ (my FOSS project, updated for iPhone Duo)