Apple might be late to the foldable party, but the iPhone Duo still brings a lot of fresh ideas to the table.
From its passport-style design to its matte folding screen and clever software, it feels more polished than many first-generation foldables. And if history has taught us anything, Android manufacturers won’t be shy about borrowing Apple’s best ideas either.
In fact, I’d bet that this iPhone Duo feature will appear on rival foldables sooner rather than later.
Fit-style form factor
Apple may not have been the first manufacturer to produce a passport-style foldable – but let’s be honest, it started the trend.
Sure, Samsung got there a month early with its similarly shaped Galaxy Z Fold 8, and the almost comically identical Xiaomi 18 Fold launched in China two Days before Apple unveiled the iPhone Duo. But Apple’s folding plans have been, according to then-CEO Tim Cook, quite widely known for several years.
Specifications, renderings and the like have been making the rounds in the tech sphere for a good while before the big reveal, giving the competition a good idea of what Apple has planned and essentially trying to beat it to the punch.
So, yes, we’ll probably see more Android foldables with a similar form factor in 2027 – Motorola has already tested one, rumors suggest Oppo is working on one, and I’d bet good money that Honor will too – although I’m not particularly mad about it.
As I found with the Z Fold 8, feel is the fit factor on the rightwith both apps and videos playing well on the inner and outer screens, certainly more so than the boxy alternatives we’ve seen so far. I imagine it will pretty much be the de facto design, even if manufacturers (ahem, Samsung) insist that the boxy aspect ratio still has its place.
Matte folding screens
The iPhone Duo’s matte folding screen does like this a lot of sense that, frankly, I’m surprised we haven’t seen it on the Android side of things until now.
The matte finish on the iPhone Duo seems to essentially address two of the biggest problems with foldable screens at the moment. The first is just how damn reflective they are; Due to their foldable nature, the screens are made of plastic rather than glass, and reflections are clear, especially in brighter environments. The matte finish looks to remove the worst of these reflections, making it instantly more pleasing to the eye than any Android foldable.
The second, and just as important, is that it helps to hide the effect of the fold that runs the central book-style folding screens – maybe not when brand new and almost invisible, but over time as the panels are constantly folded and unfolded.
If it is anyone Feature on this list that will definitely make it to Android foldable in 2027, it’s this one.
The (dangerous) return of sub-display cameras
Under-display cameras – also known as UDCs – are not a new thing in the Android world. They are quite the opposite, in fact, appearing on various devices such as Samsung, RedMagic and ZTE from 2020 to 2024, before quietly giving way to the dodo in favor of normal pin-hole cameras.
For what? Because, simply put, they weren’t very good – for the most part anyway. Samsung famously used UDC technology on previous models of its Galaxy Z Fold, but the area of the camera was all the time remarkable, so it defeated the purpose. It also meant that the camera itself took a massive hit to overall quality, as it was literally trying to look past a layer of pixels.
That’s not to say they were all terrible; I clearly remember the ZTE Axon 40 Ultra, which nails the UDC tech compared to most of the competition. The camera quality still wasn’t the best, but at least you couldn’t see a weird off-looking patch of the screen where the camera was hiding.
With Apple trying – and by early impressions online, not – to hide its camera under the Duo’s foldable inner screen, it’s possible we’ll see another revival of UDCs on Android foldables to try to match the all-screen look. Let’s just hope they are closer in quality to ZTE’s than Samsung’s, at least.
Standby mode and iOS-like UI tweaks
Apple is famous for how it marries its software and hardware, and it’s no different with the iPhone Duo. It offers software features we haven’t seen on Android foldables yet – but again, I imagine that won’t be the case for long.
This is especially true when the phone is in its tent form. Things like Apple’s standby mode, which uses the Duo’s outer screen when in a tent form factor to show the time, notifications, weather and the like, makes a lot of sense here, as well as using the inner display as a light when your morning alarm goes off.
Then there are more fundamental tweaks to the UI to better fit the foldable form factor, such as Apple moving the dock from the bottom – where it’s lived since the beginning of the first iPhone – to the right side for better accessibility, and the combined battery, Wi-Fi and cellular signal icon saving valuable screen space.
Again, these seem like no-brainers when you really think about it, and it’s surprising that we haven’t seen anything like it in the years of Android foldables that came before.
Well, for now, anyway – I swear I can hear Honor’s MagicOS software team salivating from here.
Am I surprised by any of this? Not really. Apple tends to set trends in the smartphone world, especially when it comes to the design side of things, and it will be no different now that the iPhone Duo is here.