Apps Will Need to Be Updated

Although Apple’s iPhone Duo demos looked gorgeous yesterday, showing apps seamlessly transitioning and unfolding onto the larger screen as the iPhone Duo was opened, it’s significant that Apple only showed this working mostly with its own first-party apps.

That’s because developers will very much need to update their apps to take advantage of the iPhone Duo’s displays. In fact, non-updated apps will look awkward on the outer screen, and downright silly on the inside.

Apps that haven’t even been updated to iOS 27 will fare the worst. They’ll simply be shown in a standard iPhone aspect ratio. That will leave some blank space on the outer screen — effectively a black bar on the right where the clock and status ring live — but will simply drop them right into the centre of a black screen when unfolded.

The good news is that as long as apps have been updated for iOS 27, they’ll unfold to nearly the full width of the screen. There will still be some blank space in the status bar area on the right on both screens, but it won’t be too bad.

However, to get the full iPhone Duo experience, apps will need to be recompiled for iOS 27.1 — the version of iOS that’s shipping with the new foldable. The good news is that it doesn’t appear developers need to anything special to offer basic full-screen support, although there will be some extra steps if they really want to take full advantage of what the new device is capable of.