These clever apps show off the iPhone Duo’s potential
A digital toaster app is the fastest way to tell how serious people are about a foldable, and this early batch is firmly in playful territory. Cassette players, notebooks, flight trackers, those all make sense: the second screen gives you something to hold, flip, or reference while the main display does the heavy lifting. A toaster is just a joke with a timer, but even jokes help map where the hardware feels natural and where it feels forced.
What I find useful here is the pattern. The apps that work on a foldable tend to give the second screen its own job, not just mirror the first one. A virtual notebook that sits open like a real pad, a flight tracker that keeps one panel on the map and the other on the schedule, those are the interactions that justify the form factor. The ones that treat the folding as a party trick will disappear within a month.
I'd want to know how many of these are actually optimized for the hinge, how the multitasking API holds up, and whether Apple is nudging developers toward specific layouts. The hardware only wins if the software gives people a reason to pick the folder over a regular phone. The toaster is fun, but the notebook is where the real test starts.