4 ms·

Finally! So we have a little over a month between getting the simulator and first customers running our apps in Duo. I expect that most apps will look rather b

by yreg 14d ago

Finally! So we have a little over a month between getting the simulator and first customers running our apps in Duo. I expect that most apps will look rather broken on release, but it will be smoothed out eventually.

reaperducer 14d ago
I expect that most apps will look rather broken on release, but it will be smoothed out eventually. 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.
- c-hendricks 14d ago
  To me that's said more about Instagram than the feasibility of building an app for a tablet.
- pkamb 14d ago
  Instagram released a Reels-first iPad app that is much, much worse than the old iPhone-on-iPad app.
  - basisword 14d ago
    They finally released the full experience a few months back. I think their original excuse (years ago) was that 'people take photos on iPhone so iPad is unnecessary for Instagram'.
comandillos 14d ago
"You are a experienced iOS Software Engineer, your task is to migrate this application to the iPhone Duo layout...
- thih9 14d ago
  “Here is your iOS app migrated to Surface Duo…” 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/technologyoverviews/preparing-your-app-for-iphone-duo https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technologyoverview...
  - CharlesW 14d ago
    > Tongue half in cheek, my point is that agents may be unreliable with fresh libraries. You may find Axiom (my FOSS project, updated for iPhone Duo) helpful. https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ 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.
  - matthewfcarlson 13d ago
    Fun fact, I’ve now worked on the surface duo (technically the windows version not the android version) and the iPhone duo. 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.
- yreg 14d ago
  Yeah, good luck with that.
james_pm 14d ago
Fired it up to check my own app (RunnerCast) and it looks fine. The Liquid Glass menu moves from the bottom to the right side automatically both on the inner and outer screens. If you already had a layout that worked for iOS and iPadOS, things adapt fine to the inside screen and when you go split screen with two apps, the layout adapts nicely. I don't think I'll need to do a thing. 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.
- kccqzy 13d ago
  It’s really interesting to note how the bigger apps deferred adopting Liquid Glass altogether until iOS 26 is out for almost a year. Do most developers making large apps also loathe it? Do they have in-house designers telling them not to adopt it?
  - wahnfrieden 13d ago
    It’s a lot of work
  - earthnail 13d ago
    It breaks most design languages. It’s not a neutral element.
- yreg 13d ago
  > some of the bigger apps to switch to the Liquid Glass Interestingly, Instagram decided to implement a custom liquid-glass like tab bar which surely now turns to be a PITA.
  - 1f60c 13d ago
    It also happens to look ugly AF. Even WhatsApp gets it right.
- shantara 13d ago
  iOS 27 SDK will ignore the liquid glass compatibility flag, so the developers are now being forced to adopt it, unless they choose to stay with an old SDK version and all the hassle it brings. https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/832710?answerId=892149022#892149022 https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/832710?answerId=89...
alexashka 13d ago
Most apps people actually use will look fine because there's a team of mobile devs in all big companies who get paid to keep up with Apple breaking their apps every year with their 'updates' (among other things). 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 :)
- makeitdouble 13d ago
  This is the first time we get an iPhone skew that is significantly different and with no sales track record. 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.
- yreg 13d ago
  In plenty of big companies one month is not even enough time to get a new release into production, let alone test and fix the layouts.
  - alexashka 13d ago
    You're right. My brain must have blocked out the 'cadence' (oh the corpo speak!) of corporate dev out of self preservation.
  - delian66 12d ago
    Why is that?
- ulfw 13d ago
  None seem to be working at Meta. 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
gyomu 13d ago
Apps that support iPad are 95% fine unless you do crazy custom things (which Apple has been telling developers for decades now that they shouldn’t do), and apps that are phone only are letterboxed, but still entirely usable. 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.
- addaon 13d ago
  > 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. 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.
  - ulfw 13d ago
    If he is off by an order of magnitude and it's 0.1% still no developer (unless a fanboy) should bother
    - Grombobulous 13d ago
      Although maybe they should because someone willing to buy a $2000 phone on launch is probably more willing to buy a lot more things versus someone who keeps phones a long time.
    - 13d ago
pjmlp 13d ago
Unless Apple uses their stick (whip, or whatever else) to drive the developer community, I bet iOS will experience the same app fragmentation as Android does regarding various form factors, more so than between iPad, iPhone and iWatch already.
alwillis 13d ago
> I expect that most apps will look rather broken on release, but it will be smoothed out eventually. 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 https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/278 [2]: "Modernize your UIKit app" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origami
- bartvk 13d ago
  Also, every iPad has a full window server. So any app that was available for iPad, should've been resizable in any shape.

by yreg 14d ago

reaperducer 14d ago

I expect that most apps will look rather broken on release, but it will be smoothed out eventually. 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.

c-hendricks 14d ago
To me that's said more about Instagram than the feasibility of building an app for a tablet.
pkamb 14d ago
Instagram released a Reels-first iPad app that is much, much worse than the old iPhone-on-iPad app.
- basisword 14d ago
  They finally released the full experience a few months back. I think their original excuse (years ago) was that 'people take photos on iPhone so iPad is unnecessary for Instagram'.

comandillos 14d ago

"You are a experienced iOS Software Engineer, your task is to migrate this application to the iPhone Duo layout...

thih9 14d ago
“Here is your iOS app migrated to Surface Duo…” 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/technologyoverviews/preparing-your-app-for-iphone-duo https://developer.apple.com/documentation/technologyoverview...
- CharlesW 14d ago
  > Tongue half in cheek, my point is that agents may be unreliable with fresh libraries. You may find Axiom (my FOSS project, updated for iPhone Duo) helpful. https://charleswiltgen.github.io/Axiom/ 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.
- matthewfcarlson 13d ago
  Fun fact, I’ve now worked on the surface duo (technically the windows version not the android version) and the iPhone duo. 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.
yreg 14d ago
Yeah, good luck with that.

james_pm 14d ago

Fired it up to check my own app (RunnerCast) and it looks fine. The Liquid Glass menu moves from the bottom to the right side automatically both on the inner and outer screens. If you already had a layout that worked for iOS and iPadOS, things adapt fine to the inside screen and when you go split screen with two apps, the layout adapts nicely. I don't think I'll need to do a thing. 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.

kccqzy 13d ago
It’s really interesting to note how the bigger apps deferred adopting Liquid Glass altogether until iOS 26 is out for almost a year. Do most developers making large apps also loathe it? Do they have in-house designers telling them not to adopt it?
- wahnfrieden 13d ago
  It’s a lot of work
- earthnail 13d ago
  It breaks most design languages. It’s not a neutral element.
yreg 13d ago
> some of the bigger apps to switch to the Liquid Glass Interestingly, Instagram decided to implement a custom liquid-glass like tab bar which surely now turns to be a PITA.
- 1f60c 13d ago
  It also happens to look ugly AF. Even WhatsApp gets it right.
shantara 13d ago
iOS 27 SDK will ignore the liquid glass compatibility flag, so the developers are now being forced to adopt it, unless they choose to stay with an old SDK version and all the hassle it brings. https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/832710?answerId=892149022#892149022 https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/832710?answerId=89...

alexashka 13d ago

Most apps people actually use will look fine because there's a team of mobile devs in all big companies who get paid to keep up with Apple breaking their apps every year with their 'updates' (among other things). 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 :)

makeitdouble 13d ago
This is the first time we get an iPhone skew that is significantly different and with no sales track record. 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.
yreg 13d ago
In plenty of big companies one month is not even enough time to get a new release into production, let alone test and fix the layouts.
- alexashka 13d ago
  You're right. My brain must have blocked out the 'cadence' (oh the corpo speak!) of corporate dev out of self preservation.
- delian66 12d ago
  Why is that?
ulfw 13d ago
None seem to be working at Meta. 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

gyomu 13d ago

Apps that support iPad are 95% fine unless you do crazy custom things (which Apple has been telling developers for decades now that they shouldn’t do), and apps that are phone only are letterboxed, but still entirely usable. 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.

addaon 13d ago
> 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. 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.
- ulfw 13d ago
  If he is off by an order of magnitude and it's 0.1% still no developer (unless a fanboy) should bother
  - Grombobulous 13d ago
    Although maybe they should because someone willing to buy a $2000 phone on launch is probably more willing to buy a lot more things versus someone who keeps phones a long time.
  - 13d ago

pjmlp 13d ago

Unless Apple uses their stick (whip, or whatever else) to drive the developer community, I bet iOS will experience the same app fragmentation as Android does regarding various form factors, more so than between iPad, iPhone and iWatch already.

alwillis 13d ago

> I expect that most apps will look rather broken on release, but it will be smoothed out eventually. 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 https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2026/278 [2]: "Modernize your UIKit app" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origami https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origami

bartvk 13d ago
Also, every iPad has a full window server. So any app that was available for iPad, should've been resizable in any shape.