Two weeks after the iPhone Duo reached its first buyers, Apple is trying to settle one of the biggest questions hanging over any foldable phone: whether the apps people actually use will make proper use of the bigger screen. The company now says more than 100,000 apps on the App Store have been built to support its first foldable, and that thousands more optimized titles are arriving every day.
Susan Prescott, who heads Apple’s worldwide developer relations, points to a list of recent arrivals that leans heavily on everyday names. Microsoft’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote are on board, alongside Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Instagram, WhatsApp and Zoom. Sports apps from the NBA, NHL and MLB are included, as are productivity and utility favourites such as Goodnotes, Fantastical, Flighty, Etsy, SmartGym and the Halide Mark III camera app. Apps that have been updated carry a Made for iPhone Duo badge on their App Store listings when browsed from the device itself.
That 100,000 figure needs some perspective. The App Store hosts millions of apps, so the optimized share is still a small slice of the catalogue, even if it likely covers a large portion of what most people open daily. Gaps remain, and Google Maps only recently received its own update for the foldable.
Part of the speed comes from how Apple has built the platform. Apps that rely on standard SwiftUI and UIKit components can reshape themselves automatically for each display, while new APIs give developers control over custom layouts and how an app behaves at different hinge positions. Apple has also been working the developer side directly, running over 50 in-person workshops across 19 cities in the past month, which it says drew more than 2,000 developers.
Software support is where Android foldables have historically stumbled. Samsung’s Galaxy Fold line spent years living with apps that simply stretched or letterboxed on the inner panel, a hangover from Android’s long-standing tablet app problem. Apple’s advantage is a developer base already used to designing for multiple screen sizes across iPhone and iPad, along with the leverage to push big partners into updating early.
Older apps will still run on the iPhone Duo, but they may not fill the inner display properly, which is not a great look on a phone that starts at £1,999 in the UK and €2,299 in Europe. Apple expects the update pace to keep accelerating. The real test is how long the long tail of smaller, less actively maintained apps takes to follow.