As a recent Android foldable phone owner (Google Pixel), I'm excited that the Duo will get developers to actually design apps for foldables. Right now, some apps don't work at all and others are just stretched. I feel a better use of the screen space is around the corner for both Android foldable and Duo users.
As a dev who regularly works on apps for both platforms, I think one of the main causes for poor support for form factors beyond a standard smartphone on Android boils down to Google refusing to give developers fully fleshed out APIs to support said form factors.
Instead, they just hand you some poorly documented loose parts in a box and tell you, “good luck” and you’re on your own to fill the gaps. Compose is a little better about giving the tools you need than the preceding Android Framework, but it’s still much more “assembly required” and “batteries not included” than the UIKit+SwiftUI world is.
Many iOS apps built using system components will behave 90%+ correctly on the Duo by just compiling against the iOS 27.1 SDK because there are well supported methods of doing things that Apple can leverage to reduce dev work. In contrast, on Android there's 10 ways of doing anything none of which get full-throated support (on top of all the other ways devs invent), and so any time it gains support for a new form factor almost nothing is automatic and it all falls on the devs’ shoulders.
> Instead, they just hand you some poorly documented loose parts in a box and tell you, “good luck” and you’re on your own to fill the gaps.
Google is fundamentally a spy company, not a product company
All of FAANG is, if we're being cynically reductive.
Apple has a very different business model than Google (Alphabet). It's not even close to the same in terms of how they make most of their money.
It did do, but now it's putting ads in everything it will rapidly converge to the same practices to optimise shareholder value.
As if hardware companies don't quite famously include spyware in their products. Everything from phones, cars, fridges, TVs, monitors, speakers, light bulbs, laptops and everything else that supports inclusion of spyware.
I don't disagree. They're still a spy company, if we're being cynically reductive.
Is there a way to ELI5 Google's primary business model without it coming across as spying on people?
Very few have the same problem among FAANG and others.
Ads, Google is the world's largest ad company.
Internally they can do anything EXCEPT fuck with the ad revenue. If you get more ways to get data off users and ad views, good.
You're not wrong today, but they are expanding their ads department to the detriment of users: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46911901, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46322556, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22501511
Another reason is hardware fragmentation. An Android developer has to account for over 20,000 unique devices, compared to an Apple developer targeting around 40 supported models at most.
It’s a factor, but the bulk of those devices can be generalized into a handful of categories. Google could also throw around its weight a bit more to get manufacturers to form a consensus on things like how various components are addressed so it doesn’t need to spin its wheels as much on papering over those differences.
???
WindowSizeClasses, Postures, Navigation3, ListDetailScaffolds, the list goes on. Android & Compose is pretty much flawless when it comes to develop for it, it's thoroughly documented and works well.
Layouts will not magically be not dog shit on iOS because Apple put out another version of SwiftUI that you can't use in prod because nobody has the update. 90% of the apps will be stretched. Horizontally. The reality of it is, it's pretty much never worth it to make layouts that are specialised for foldables/tablets.
Also, it's pretty fucking funny to be worshipping Apple like that when they have a single device to support, and then complain about Android that literally had to pave the way and today works on phones that can unfold three times, phones like the galaxy Z Flip that have instead half screens, etc. Apple will tell you they can't back port dynamic islands on last year's release, while latest Compose is happily running on devices from 10 years ago.
> WindowSizeClasses, Postures, Navigation3, ListDetailScaffolds, the list goes on.
Yes, those are the loose parts. They still have to be assembled correctly for everything to work as expected and every app does it a bit differently (there is effectively no endorsed "correct" way to assemble them). This means that Google cannot extend them with new functionality later without breaking some if not most usages of those parts in the future.
Compare that to UITabController in UIKit, which has been present since very early on and got extended recently. If the dev adopts iOS 18 revisions, configuring that single view controller gets you more or less correct presentation and navigation across all sizes and orientations of normal iPhone, iPad, desktop, and now iPhone Duo and implementation is close to identical between apps.
> …and then complain about Android that literally had to pave the way and today works on phones that can unfold three times, phones like the galaxy Z Flip that have instead half screens, etc.
That's fair, but users can't reasonably expect any kind of meaningful adoption of new oddball form factors like that until the platform vendor (Google) rolls out standardized APIs to streamline the process (which Google has partially done, but won't commit to a unified solution for).
> Apple will tell you they can't back port dynamic islands on last year's release, while latest Compose is happily running on devices from 10 years ago.
That is an advantage, but iOS users tend to stay much more up to date so it's something of a moot point. The userbase of versions just three major releases behind is typically below 5% and anything older is fractional at best, so unless you're a Google-scale giant you're probably fine only supporting the newest 2-3 versions of iOS. That's pretty nice since I don't need to keep a drawer full of prehistoric phones running ancient versions of Android to test adequately (so I don't find out about some weird behavior that only occurs under Android 11 in prod)…
It would depend on the sales volume. For a long time the iPad has been available and many developers simply are content to have a stretched version of their iPhone app on their iPad, because the sales volume isn’t sufficient. If foldable phones sell like iPads, this could very well happen to them too.
I still think that there are very few examples of apps that utilize tablets well even among the apps that aren't stretched phone apps. I don't know if it is the ergonomics of the large screen or what, but the experience of using a tablet has always been pretty bad in my opinion.
Maybe the folding phone form factor will inspire some better UI/UX for apps.
Exactly, I remember until recently even instagram didn’t have a proper iPad app that uses the complete screen space
The rumours say 10 million iPhone Duo are being made, there are hundreds of millions of iPads so the numbers might not sway any opinions for a while.
I think they need to aggressively court developers, just give a buttload of advertising credit to nice apps that predate AI slop if they add compatibility, what does it cost Apple to "give" you $10k or $20k credit in their own ad system...
But the rumours also say they are going to squeeze the App Store for higher margins so maybe it is too late.
> "A large fraction of the flaws in software development are due to programmers not fully understanding all the possible states their code may execute in."
This is a quote from John Carmack and should sit over every developers monitor. At the same time, OS designers should be doing everything in their power to reduce the number of states a developer has to think about.
Like one of the things I hate about frontend development - and admire people who do this professionally - is the stupid and arbitrary rules browsers impose on you.
'You may only play audio if such and such conditions are met. However these are different based on browser and platform. Good luck making a solution fitting all these.'
'The browser might lie about what's the available screen estate is, but only sometimes'
'There is a perfect API for what you wanna do, however it's not in Safari'
And a testament on how obscure and arcane knowledge is on doing things right is that I thought there would be some npm packages that do these things for me, but no - you have to hunt around for solutions and fix things yourself.
And LLMs are completely useless and confidently wrong mostly about everything involving this.
Yep fundamentally different from back end because you don't control the client.
In theory the client can do literally anything (for example, someone could be using an ancient version or have some features voluntarily disabled) and you have to decide which things you're going to handle
I don't want to be pessimistic, but I can see a single app now showing two different feeds to doomscroll.
Subway surfers and tiktok at the same time. The future is now chud.
Instagram posts on one side and reels on the other side
Perhaps they'll dedicate one screen to advertising so that you can't scroll past them? The horror
My immediate thought seeing this design was how expensive this is going to be for companies to get their existing apps to look good on this thing.
> I'm excited that the Duo will get developers to actually design apps for foldables.
For Apple foldables yes. Not Android.
Same here. I ditched the google pixel fold after a year because the hardware had some issues, also tbh I prefer the iOS ecosystem. I’m so glad this is coming out.
Developers will design apps for Apple's foldables.
Cross-platform is a thing.
If anyting, Apple stands to gain from what was already developed for Android.
Like https://developer.android.com/phones-tablets-foldables
Which targets iOS also: https://kotlinlang.org/compose-multiplatform
React Native and Flutter are way more popular than KMM/CM, and yet both have struggled to support even small iOS visual changes in a timely fashion.
This is ignoring the fact that developers who choose these cross-platform frameworks don't seem to care much about quality and general polish.
It is a thing to some extent, but there’s also a correlation of companies that do cross-platform for simple apps being cheap on development, and making it work very well on some specific platform isn’t their priority.
Thought it will bring "desiging for foldables" onto the table which would benefit Android foldables too.
> a better use of the screen space is around the corner
I see what you did there :)
> As a recent Android foldable phone owner (Google Pixel)
"There are dozens of us!" (not me though, I wouldn't buy a Pixel foldable)