Shortlists for a phone that opens.
The iPhone Duo went on sale on 23 October 2026. It opens from a 5.4-inch screen to a 7.6-inch one, which is the first time an iPhone has had enough glass to change what an app can reasonably attempt. Each list below takes one thing people do with a phone and asks which apps have somewhere to put the extra room.
Drawing & design
4 apps
Colouring apps with a bigger page to fill
Colouring is close work on a small patch of a big picture, and the unfolded screen shows more of the picture. Four apps for it, starting with one built around the artists who draw its pages.
Code & terminals
7 apps
Writing code on a phone, and seeing what it did
Code is the one kind of writing with a column width decided decades ago by hardware, and a terminal that cannot show eighty characters is a terminal that lies about what it is printing.
Spreadsheets
6 apps
More columns before the scrolling starts
A spreadsheet is the one document that tells you immediately whether the screen is big enough: either the columns you need are on it, or they are not.
Calendars & planning
7 apps
A month you can see and a day you can read
A calendar has always had two jobs that want different amounts of space: showing you the shape of a month, and showing you what is actually happening on Tuesday.
Mail
7 apps
Mail apps that stop choosing between the list and the letter
An inbox on a phone is a list that hides the message or a message that hides the list. Opening the screen is the first time an iPhone has had room to stop choosing.
Where it runs out
7 apps
The apps the extra screen does least for
A list of apps that are on this site and gain almost nothing from opening the phone, because a site making one argument ought to be able to say where that argument stops.
Instead of a laptop
7 apps
The apps that finish the job rather than start it
Now the device is out, the useful question is not whether it is bigger. It is which jobs can be completed on it and handed on, without opening something else to do the last part.
Grids
6 apps
Apps built on a grid of cells
After two panes, a canvas with no edges and a timeline, the fourth shape a screen gets asked to take: a grid, where what you can see is what you can reach.
Writing by hand
7 apps
Handwriting apps, before there is anything to write with
Apple's own FAQ puts stylus support later in the year. Until it arrives these are finger-and-keyboard apps, and that changes which of them is worth opening now.
Brought over
7 apps
Apps that were drawn for a bigger screen first
Software that began on a desktop or a tablet and has spent years folding itself down to a phone. The layout these apps want already exists somewhere; it has simply never fitted here.
