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.

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 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> 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.

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james_pm 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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yreg 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It also happens to look ugly AF. Even WhatsApp gets it right.

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kccqzy 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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?

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reaperducer 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

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pkamb 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Instagram released a Reels-first iPad app that is much, much worse than the old iPhone-on-iPad app.

	▲	basisword 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		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'.

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c-hendricks 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To me that's said more about Instagram than the feasibility of building an app for a tablet.

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comandillos 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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thih9 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

“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/technologyoverview...

	▲	CharlesW 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> 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/ 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 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		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.

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yreg 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, good luck with that.

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alexashka 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 :)

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makeitdouble 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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yreg 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You're right. My brain must have blocked out the 'cadence' (oh the corpo speak!) of corporate dev out of self preservation.