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.
> 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.
Why? If you’re spending 2000 hours a year servicing your current customers, surely it’s worth 20 hours to add on 1%, even ignoring that that 1% is probably more valuable than your average customer, and the halo effect of giving a good experience to existing users migrating devices.
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.
Usually just compiling with the new SDK will get apps basic support if they have been following Apple standards.
> I have friends who dropped everything to support the Vision Pro
The VP was a niche device for a niche market. Phones are not that. I think the Duo will do very well. The one knock are the cameras do not match the Pro. I don't think will care though.
> 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.
They should remember that they got quite a bit of social capital within Apple by doing that and hopefully they're keeping those relationships warm. But yeah Vision Pro hasn't turned out to be a big ecosystem so far.
Because Apple has always treated its developers so well!
Vision Pro will be cancelled at some point, it’s just nowhere near popular enough and never will be - the air has gone out of that VR bubble.
I wouldn’t be surprised if duo is also cancelled because it is another copycat move which is not central to Apples business and will not be mass market.
Because despite Apple having clear guidelines a huge number of developers think their 'custom UI' is what customers really want. When they don't. The best apps use system components and follow the HIG. Always have, always will. Your custom tab bar is stupid.
Apple does many crazy custom things in their own apps. Their advice is not sacrosanct. It just means you must prepare for less notice than they had if you want to compete with the frontier UI aspects that Apple apps achieve.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'.
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 :)
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.
Doesn't Tokyo have very low unemployment? According to Wikipedia: Japan 2.5%, Singapore 3.2%, USA 4.1%, EU 5.2%.
I expect Tokyo is probably even lower than the national average. Visiting just as a tourist it seems like Japan is quite good at creating, I don't want to say bullshit jobs, but perhaps not-that-necessary jobs? Jobs which mainly serve to give something to do to (usually) elderly. My understanding was that the idea is to make them feel to be a contributing part of the society(?)
I mean all the people controlling the pedestrians or acting like "human signs" and such.
I think the US does the same? At the very least it doesn't make sense to include retired people in unemployment. By similar logic I think it doesn't make sense to count people who are not actively looking for employment.
Don't make the mistake to think these jobs are just there to keep bored retirees active. The basic old age pension (kokumin nenkin - for sole-proprietors and people who have worked in non-permanent positions or small companies) is significantly below the poverty line at 70,600¥ per month -- that's $450 and that's if you've worked for 40 years without any gaps.
The vast majority of old people working these jobs, e.g. construction site security, do so because they would likely starve without it.
State pensions everywhere tend to assume home ownership. I haven't been to Japan since they started doing wild funny money stuff, so I don't know what that's doing to local prices/economies, but not that long ago $450 + home ownership would have been completely fine in many areas.
Due to its aging population and lack of mass immigration, Japan has a desperate labor shortage in many fields.
I don't think taxi driving in Tokyo is one of them (because, as noted, the qualifications needed are pretty minimal), although eg bus drivers are in extremely short supply.
So the insurance would then, instead of contracting the current service-provider for the 3rd party app, contract also with Apple and, let's say Samsung?
And then stop the 3rd party app which is vendor-agnostic and works on all devices?
I'd say that's unlikely.
IF that's an industry this Apple-feature will disrupt, it seems it will barely have an impact on the process of insurance companies themselves, but will actually disrupt the service-provider industry FOR insurances:
The insurance won't be able to stop their existing 3rd party cost-saving, as it provides the largest device-coverage for offloading to the customer.
Instead, either the insurance or the 3rd party service-provider will have to pay Apple in addition to make use of this feature, with the hopes that the provided data will reduce fraud.
Which brings me back to my actual question: What is the fraud-vector here?
> So the insurance would then, instead of contracting the current service-provider for the 3rd party app, contract also with Apple and, let's say Samsung?
The industry has some extensive experience in independently verifying signatures, I don't see how the manufacturers factor in here. And for app features, just ask banks how integrating biometrics, payment services, etc. goes. Tends to be preferred, once Apple and Google Pay became fully available here in Austria, banks dropped their own NFC payment solutions in rapid succession.
>So the insurance would then, instead of contracting the current service-provider for the 3rd party app, contract also with Apple and, let's say Samsung?
There would be no contract, you just upload image from your phone and they verify signature in the file
I tend to fly cheaply with multiple transfers/layovers. What I figured out recently is that it is nice to combine the flights in such a way that one of the layovers is _longer_.
When the airport has a good connection to a major city then 12 hours during the day are enough, but I'm happy to bump it to 2-3 days.
I have managed to visit some Chinese and Canadian cities this way and it was both more interesting and much cheaper than taking a direct flight.
I have a dedicated Wifi 6 (not 6e, so just miss/using the 5 GHz band) AP just for VR, directly connected to my PC and it works well Virtual Desktop & Quest 3.
Have done quite a lot of quite active stuff (exploration, driving, flying, fighting games) and it really is seamless and I don't notice any lag as long as the game itself manages good FPS.
If you really concentrate on the graphics, you can see some compression artifacts in places, but it is unnoticeable when you are actually doing VR stuff, not just looking for it. :)
For the Frame, this should all be much better - easier setup, much better available bandwidth (dongle has Wifi 7), efficient foveated streaming, etc. :) I would exect better image quality (more bandwidth, more efficient streaming), better FPS (more efficient rendering) and better image quality (can reduce compression).
I remember around iPhone 6 or such popular design rumours that were circulating around turned out to be wrong. There were photos of chinese warehouses filled with cases made for the incorrect design.
With iPhone 4 Gizmodo literally acquired the prototype and still large portion of the crowd did not believe them, because the design seemed radically different to what they expected.
Nowadays with the size of the supply line there seem to remain no more hardware secrets before the keynotes.
I expect that most apps will look rather broken on release, but it will be smoothed out eventually.
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