100,000 iPhone Duo Apps Are Live, Apple Says, but Not All Fit the Screen Yet

Two weeks after Apple’s first foldable went on sale, the company says the number of iPhone Duo apps built for its 4:3 inner display has passed 100,000. That figure comes from Apple itself, and it arrives just as early owners have begun complaining that some favorite apps don’t fill the bigger screen.

Apple gave the same statement to several outlets on November 6. Susan Prescott, vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations, said there are “well over 100,000 apps built for iPhone Duo already live on the App Store,” with “thousands of optimized apps” being added each day. She credited developer enthusiasm and said she expects updates to keep accelerating.

Why the iPhone Duo app count matters

A foldable with an unusual aspect ratio is only as good as the software running on it. CNET’s reporting describes a familiar early-adopter problem: it launched Discord and found the app floating in the middle of the inner display with black bars on both sides instead of using the whole panel. CNET notes this is common with new hardware designs and was seen on many Android foldables, where optimized apps took time to arrive.

Apple’s number is meant to show the gap is closing fast. The company says thousands of developers have attended workshops in 19 cities over the past month. 9to5Mac reports that Apple put the total at more than 2,000 developers across more than 50 in-person sessions. Apple is also promoting the effort in the App Store, with editorial collections such as “Popular Apps on iPhone Duo” and “Great Games on iPhone Duo,” plus a “Made for iPhone Duo” badge on the product pages of optimized apps.

Which apps have been updated

Apple shared a long list of recently optimized titles sorted by category. Some of the more notable examples:

• Work: Microsoft Word, Outlook, Excel and PowerPoint, plus Zoom and monday.com. CNET says Word and Outlook have been adjusted to resemble their desktop versions, while Zoom uses the inner screen as a larger video meeting space.
• Sports and entertainment: the NBA and NHL apps, Spotify, Tubi, BBC iPlayer in the UK and Apple Music Classical.
• AI and news: ChatGPT, Grok and Microsoft Copilot, along with Substack, The Washington Post and Yahoo News.
• Creative and shopping: Halide Mark III, Canva, Suno, Etsy and LTK Creator.
• Everyday services: Strava, MyFitnessPal, Kroger, Domino’s, Taco Bell, The Weather Channel and Transit.

The camera app Halide Mark III is a good example of what developers can do with the hardware. According to CNET, it shows a viewfinder on the cover screen when the phone is closed and can switch to a waist-level viewfinder when the phone is half open. CNET also says iOS 27.2 should add Apple Pencil (USB-C) support, which would let Duo owners write directly in compatible apps such as Apple Notes.

Optimized does not always mean polished

The headline number comes with caveats. The Verge points out that the “Made for iPhone Duo” label doesn’t guarantee a clean experience. At launch, users described the Instagram app as messy despite the badge, and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri called the Duo a “bit of a tricky form factor.” The same report says apps can still have issues even after they’ve been updated.

There is encouraging evidence on that front, though. 9to5Mac’s editor-in-chief says apps that supported the Duo at launch have since received follow-up updates that improve how they handle both the inner and outer displays. A reader comment on that story praised a recent Google Maps update as a big improvement. That’s anecdotal, but it suggests the first wave of support is being refined and not just checked off.

What to watch next

Apple didn’t say how many apps in total were on the App Store or what share of the most-used titles have been updated. It also didn’t define “built for” or “optimized,” so 100,000 shows momentum but not how well any given app performs. The more useful signals will be whether big names that still look awkward on the inner display, such as Discord in CNET’s early test, get updates in the coming weeks, and whether the rate of new iPhone Duo apps holds at “thousands a day.”

For now, the early picture matches earlier foldable launches. Hardware arrives first and software catches up, and Apple’s developer push appears to be shortening that wait.

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File photo: Apple iPhone Duo.jpg by SimonWaldherr, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.