Apple’s foldable iPhone Duo is officially on sale. The much-hyped handset is already hard to come by, it seems, with backorders reportedly pushed into next year (via 9to5Mac). If you’re lucky enough to have secured a unit this early on, the good news is that there are plenty of tailor-made applications already available for the newfangled form factor.
Here are five of the most exciting third-party apps for the iPhone Duo that are already available to download from the Apple App Store. These apps are ingenious and filled with whimsy, and I personally can’t get enough of them. Each app on this list makes clever use of the Duo’s unique capabilities, and each serves as an excellent tech demo of the new hardware.
Deck-Man
The return of the Sony Walkman
Perhaps the most prolific application on this entire list, Deck-Man is a music player that recreates the look and feel of a retro portable cassette player. The app lets you load cassette tapes directly into the virtual player, with mechanical clicks and cassette sounds sourced from a real portable player. There are skins on deck here, and the tape can even get tangled. Available via a one-time purchase, Deck-Man works with both Apple Music and local audio files. The app is designed with the Duo in mind, sprawling out across the large screen and taking advantage of all the extra screen real estate.
Battlefleet Duo
Battleship for the Duo era
Battlefleet Duo takes the classic navel strategy board game battleship and recreates it with the iPhone Duo’s form factor in mind. There’s a dedicated tabletop mode here, which places your fleet on the lower portion of the screen and the enemy’s waters up on the top portion. The game adapts as you fold the Duo, with a full-screen mode also available, as well as a two-player face-to-face mode. Available via a single-time purchase, Battlefleet Duo is filled with modes, including online support with Game Center integration.
Delta 2.0
It’s Nintendo DS time
For some time now, Delta has been one of the premier retro game console emulation apps for iOS and iPadOS. With the release of Delta 2.0, the application now takes advantage of the iPhone Duo’s form factor, with optimized skins for every pose in both portrait and landscape orientations, support for Split View multitasking, and, most notably, a proper Nintendo DS clamshell mode that even puts games to sleep when closing the lid as if it were running on original hardware. Delta 2.0 also features a full Liquid Glass aesthetic, support for the Sega Genesis console, and tons of other improvements. The app is entirely free to download with no ads or trackers to speak of.
PianoFold
Tap Tap Revenge is reborn
If you were a fan of Tap Tap Revenge back in the day, then you’ll love PianoFold. This iPhone Duo-optimized rhythm game tasks you with tapping tiles as they flow across the screen, with over 40 levels to choose from, and with plenty of musical tracks from Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and other artists. The app works perfectly with the Duo in laptop mode, and it feels genuinely intuitive to play through levels. PianoFold is free to start with, but requires a one-time purchase to unlock its full breadth of features.
Tiny Computers
A Duo-tastic display of classic PCs
Tiny Computers is arguably my favorite application on this list. It’s essentially a virtual museum of miniature retro computers, allowing you to fold the iPhone Duo into tabletop mode to fiddle around with each device’s interface. The bottom half of the screen serves as a working keyboard, while the top half emulates the classic interface of each PC in question. Tiny Computers can be had for a single one-time fee, which unlocks a total of ten computers. There are no ads, subscriptions, or in-app purchases to worry about.
Honorable Mentions
Plenty of excellent apps to choose from
Aside from the aforementioned five applications, there are plenty of other iPhone Duo-optimized applications already available on the Apple App Store. Some of these apps are entirely new to the scene, while others are pre-existing but with a Duo-enhanced layer incorporated into the mix. In no particular order, here are some of my personal favorites at the time of writing:
Apple has updated the App Store with a dedicated section for iPhone Duo-optimized applications, which can be browsed through by following this link.
