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.

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.

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

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.

https://www.androidpolice.com/apple-showed-every-android-foldable-how-to-do-software-right/