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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.