After years of rumors and leaks, Apple finally launched its first foldable phone last week. The new iPhone Duo is everything we expected and heard about, and Apple certainly did its job to sell it as the best foldable ever, as if the eight or so years of foldables didn’t exist before it.
Join Android Police now to
–>
<!–
Sign in or create an account to unlock all features and enjoy the full Android Police experience.
–>
Unlock Personalized Content &
Exclusive Features For Free
- Engage in discussions in Threads
- Follow and Like top authors, topics, and trends
- Browse with fewer ads across the site
- Personalize your profile to showcase your activity
- Get a content feed tailored to your interests
By creating an account, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
You also agree to receive our newsletters; you can unsubscribe any time.
<!–
Log in – Create an account
–>
<!–
Unlimited Access & Enable All Features!
–>
<!–
Unlimited Access • All Features • Full Experience!
–>
Create an account
Please provide your email address to finish creating your account.
<!–
Create an account
–>
*Required: 8 chars, 1 capital letter, 1 number
or
By creating an account, you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
You also agree to receive our newsletters; you can unsubscribe any time.
For most of it, I was shaking my head at the company’s marketing spin and its focus on the hinge, display, and a bunch of features that we’ve had on Android for several years. A foldable has double the display?! I can use the rear camera while seeing myself?! You don’t say!
Even the most cynical in me, though, has to admit that some of the interface decisions made me stop and say, “Hey, that’s smart!”
There are enough of these that, by the end of it, I was convinced that Apple had found a way to make a foldable make sense. More than Samsung has in eight years of Galaxy Z Folds and Google in four years of Pixel Folds, and Honor, Oppo, Vivo, and others, too.
Apple solved the foldable’s dual home screen issue
The switch from right to left was always jarring for me
Setting up a home screen on a foldable has been an inconsistent experience for many years on Android, and remains so. You perfectly align your icons and widgets, then open your fold, and all of a sudden, your perfect setup doesn’t make sense.
The icons and widgets don’t fill your internal display, some of it looks empty, but worse yet, everything that was easily accessible to your right hand is now on the far left. It’s jarring, and it only works for left-handed users if we’re being honest.
Samsung and some companies allow you to create separate home screens for the internal display and the external one, which partly solves the problem, but requires you to make sure you update both when you have a favorite new widget or app.
Apple’s solution is more seamless and elegant, and more suited for right-handed users. The main home screen remains on the right side when unfolded, and what shows up on the left is extra.
Moving icons to the sides is smart
Bottom navigation and icons don’t make sense
Perhaps the biggest change Apple has brought to foldable software is to move app icons and action buttons to the side instead of the bottom. Given how “short” the iPhone Duo is, this is logical, as it makes more use of the display’s non-conventional wide aspect ratio.
Android foldables, meanwhile, keep interface elements in the same place as non-foldable phones. The app dock is at the bottom, menus remain at the top — only in-app tabs move to the left if the app is optimized for tablets like Google Photos for example.
It works well and I never thought I’d want it to be different until I saw Apple switch the app dock and in-app controls to the side. We can argue about the latter’s place, but the app dock being on the side is objectively better. I’d like that at least as an option on Android.
I’m seriously jealous of the automatic Standby Mode
Apple made a feature of the least-used foldable mode
For years now, Android foldables have tried to market the tent configuration, but it never made any sense.
It’s always better to go into laptop-mode and rest your phone on a flat surface with more stability and potential access to playback controls on the horizontal part of the display. Tent mode risked instability and didn’t add anything useful in comparison to that. So why use it?
Well, I like Apple’s answer to that. The company transformed this configuration into a feature by making it trigger Standby Mode automatically. It’s such a simple setting, and I reckon that all Samsung and Google need to do is just add a toggle to make it the default.
There’s no extra interface design or intensive design necessary. When the phone detects it’s resting in a tent configuration, it triggers the low-power mode that offers a clock, a music widget, smart home controls, and other minimal controls.
Gestures make the most of the features
The fewer button taps, the better
Part of the foldable experience is to use certain gestures to do things faster instead of precision-tapping on the screen. It’s a large display, you’re not holding it comfortably, so any time you can avoid hitting an exact target and instead just vaguely swipe is considered a win.
A few of the iPhone Duo’s gestures caught my attention as something I’d like to see on Android foldables. One is the ability to quickly save two side-by-side apps as a pair. Android offers this, of course, but it requires tapping the app toolbar at the top, not a simple gesture.
Another is the gesture that moves a fullscreen app to one side by dragging from the bottom to one side of the screen. Right now, at least on Pixels, this gesture doesn’t have an equivalent.
And finally, there’s the gesture that moves a picture-in-picture video from its floating state to pin it to the top of the screen, while resizing the main app you had underneath it to fit the rest of the available screen estate. It looks effortless and certainly beats manually resizing app windows.
Credit where it’s due: Apple made interesting choices
Apple can make the best foldable out there, it still wouldn’t win me over to its camp. There are too many idiosyncrasies in iOS that I’m not a fan of and wouldn’t want to use on a regular iPhone or, doubly so, a foldable iPhone Duo.
But that doesn’t stop me from praising what the company is doing, at least with its first foldable phone and its software experience. A lot of it has clearly been lifted from Android, but there are some new ideas, like the ones I mentioned above, that are very interesting.
I didn’t even talk about the semi-open state that moves the keyboard keys and interface elements so they don’t show up along the crease in the middle of the phone. Or the clean lock screen. Or the dual-camera Facetime. Or the excellent aspect ratio consistency between outer and inner display.
There’s a lot that’s right in the iPhone Duo’s software, so much so that it’s fair to say that Apple is about to steal the foldable revolution — at least for the next year or so. Apple has so much visibility that Android foldables won’t have a choice but to catch up with a few of these.
I can’t wait until Google and Samsung take inspiration from everything we’ve seen with the Duo. I don’t need them to copy everything verbatim, but getting a bit of competition to force them to rethink the foldable experience will be a welcome change.
Quiz
Modern foldable phones
Trivia challenge
From clamshells to book-style benders — how well do you know the foldable
phone revolution?
Foldables
Which company released the world’s first commercially available foldable smartphone?
before Samsung or Huawei launched their debut foldables. It was a rough-around-the-edges device, but it
earned its place in history as the first foldable phone you could actually buy.
actually Royole — a lesser-known Chinese display company — that launched the FlexPai in 2018, beating
the big names to the punch as the world’s first commercial foldable.
Samsung
What is the name of Samsung’s book-style foldable phone lineup, which folds outward
to reveal a large tablet-sized display?
foldable, unfolding to reveal a large inner display that approaches tablet proportions. It launched in
2019 as the Galaxy Fold before adopting the Z branding.
Galaxy Z Fold is the book-style device that unfolds into a large tablet-like screen. The two lines
represent Samsung’s two distinct approaches to foldable design.
Design
What type of hinge mechanism does the Motorola Razr+ (2023) use to allow the phone
to fold flat without a gap between the two halves?
allows the flexible display to curve into a teardrop profile when folded, enabling the device to close
completely flat. This reduces stress on the screen and eliminates the crease gap seen in some rival
foldables.
the display into a teardrop shape when folded rather than bending it at a sharp angle. This lets the
Razr close flat and helps reduce wear on the flexible display over time.
Hardware
Which foldable phone was the first to achieve an IPX8 water resistance rating, a
milestone for the category?
device for foldables — it was the first in Samsung’s lineup to earn an IPX8 water resistance rating.
This helped foldables shed their reputation as fragile novelty gadgets.
ground with an IPX8 water resistance rating — a first for the foldable category. It signalled that
foldables were maturing into durable, everyday devices rather than fragile tech demos.
Innovation
Google’s first foldable phone, the Pixel Fold, launched in 2023 with a distinctive
aspect ratio. How would you best describe its inner display shape compared to most rival book-style
foldables?
square-shaped compared to the tall, narrow inner screens found on Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold devices.
Google argued this made it feel more like a small tablet and better suited for split-screen
multitasking.
Fold 5 by offering a wider, more square inner display when unfolded. Google intentionally chose this
form factor to make multitasking feel more natural and the device more comfortable to hold in landscape
orientation.
Brands
OnePlus entered the foldable market in 2023 with the OnePlus Open. Which parent
company’s foldable technology and hinge did it closely share?
OnePlus Open shares significant hardware DNA with the OPPO Find N3, including its hinge design and
overall form factor. The two devices are essentially close siblings under different brand names.
so it’s no surprise the OnePlus Open shares its hinge and core engineering with the OPPO Find N3. It’s a
common strategy in the BBK group — develop the tech once, deploy it across multiple brands.
Foldables
What does the “Z” in Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold and Galaxy Z Flip branding represent?
to the Z-axis — the third dimension — symbolising how foldable phones add a new dimension to smartphone
design by folding through space. It’s a neat bit of branding that reflects the transformative nature of
the form factor.
three-dimensional space, representing the idea that foldable phones introduce a new physical dimension
to smartphone design. It replaced the plain “Galaxy Fold” name when Samsung committed to building out a
full foldable lineup.
Concept Phones
What major design milestone did Apple achieve with the release of the iPhone Duo in
September 2026?
market. It features a book-style folding design crafted with a titanium frame, pairing a 5.4-inch outer
display with a unfolded 7.6-inch inner display.
smartphone market. It features a book-style folding design crafted with a titanium frame, pairing a
5.4-inch outer display with a unfolded 7.6-inch inner display.
Your Score
Thanks for playing!
