iPhone Duo’s UX Design Finally Makes Foldables Useful — But Misses The Mark

How Apple’s design team made it all possible, but skipped some important things

Foldable phones have improved a lot over the past 7 years. Apple’s new device – the iPhone Duo has achieved a lot of things that other foldable experiences just don’t get right. But everything good in design comes with some caveats.

The folding animations are pure bliss & not just cosmetic

Most folding phones have very straightforward, almost boring opening and closing animations. It feels sudden and jittery, sometimes even breaking the flow when in apps or completing tasks.

The iPhone's folding animations use a nice directional, progressive blur with a depth effect from the left. This almost gives the illusion of the interface sliding from the small to the larger display.

Apps also adjust much more seamlessly. The example above displays how the gallery app goes from a small preview to a full-width display without any stutter or lag. The folding animations also help in hiding any initial expanding issues (if any exist in the future).

I'll cover a few issues with the opening and closing transitions later in this article.

The sub-par multitasking experience makes me wanting more

This is the first iPhone with multitasking features. The inner display finally supports opening two apps at once and even drag-and-drop content from one app to the other.

What’s very cool is the “sticky app” experience. Two apps can stick together to form these groups, which you can switch between just like you do with normal apps.

One of the few things I felt could be improved was the lack of multitasking on the smaller screen. The Duo just opens one of the apps you were using when you fold the phone mid-use.

Of course, split-screen apps aren’t ideal for smaller displays, but some solution could have been researched and worked on. After all, Apple has been working on this for a while now.

There is also a lack of a floating dock when apps are opened. Companies like Oppo and Samsung allow you to have an extensive dock fixed to the OS when navigating apps. Something like that could have made the iPhone Duo more tablet-like, and in my personal design experience, it was a basic user need.

I know I’m being picky, and yes, a floating dock would take up too much vertical real estate on a shorter display; but there is always a better solution (like an action to unhide a hidden one).

Seated & Standing Experiences

This is such a clever implementation of a smaller app experience when you have your phone folded or half-folded.

You can use the folding mechanism to make the phone sit on a table in front of you. On the top half, you have a video or the main content, and some useful controls or a certain set of actions on the bottom half.

A great example of this is Netflix. The video can run on the top half, while video scrubbing controls lie at the bottom without being a distraction.

The real star was the “standing” mode, where you can get a mini or micro app experience. If you have the clock open, you’ll get a table-side clock style. If your alarm pops up, the inner screen will glow a nice orange, adding another layer to the immersion.

Developers and designers can create completely separate experiences for both! My inner designer is so excited to see what people create.

These are initial bugs that we’ll see with the Duo. Users will have to wait 9–12 months before most of the mainstream apps support these modes.

The hinge is actually interactive!

This got me excited like a little kid. Developers and designers will be able to detect how much the hinge is closed/opened.

A great example of this is how a guitar app can allow the user to adjust the hinge to create a unique sound, like with an actual guitar whammy bar.

Check this out:

This opens a whole new set of opportunities for developers to provide a deeper, more meaningful experience with the hinge. This is for sure the first time I’ve seen such an implementation of motion interactions.

Everything sticks to the edges

They’ve moved the toolbar and tab bar to the right by default, where they stick persistently without moving.

The status bar is also now on the right above the other controls. Instead of having three status bar icons, you have a collapsible icon that opens to display the others and changes to show status.

The whole idea is to make everything accessible with one hand and one finger. A wide screen makes one-hand usage tricky, so the side action buttons will be useful.

The iPhone Duo also lets two apps have two different controls, stuck to the opposite side of the screen. The app on the left sticks the controls to the left, and the right one to the right.

They hid the front camera

The inner camera on the iPhone Duo is actually hidden from plain sight. You can barely see the little camera notch in most lighting conditions, but it’s a behind-the-screen camera. This only shows up when the camera is active.

This gives the feeling of immersion even when inside basic apps like iMessage and keeps things distraction-free.

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iPhone Duo’s UX Design Finally Makes Foldables Useful — But Misses The Mark was originally published in Bootcamp on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.