I’ve reviewed almost every Android foldable this year — here’s how the iPhone Duo compares

When I first read Allison and Nilay’s Verge review of the iPhone Duo, I was immediately struck by one of their complaints: that the cover display is too small. That’s not how the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 feels, I thought. Had they got it wrong?

After a week and a half using the Duo, I know exactly what they mean — and it’s not the screen’s fault at all. Apps that feel comfortable on Samsung’s short foldable and the similarly sized Xiaomi 18 Fold are often cramped and compact on the Duo’s cover screen, robbed of screen space by a right-hand rail that most apps don’t make use of anyway.

That’s just one of the ways that Apple’s first foldable feels fundamentally different from the Android alternatives. I’ve reviewed almost every Android foldable that was released this year, from Samsung and Google to Honor and Oppo, and I’ve been surprised to realize that the Duo holds its own against them all on hardware, but is let down by iOS itself. For now at least, Android is slicker for folding phones — though I don’t know how long that will last.

Size, shape, and build quality

The iPhone Duo feels great. Mostly. Its curved frame and Ceramic Shield back have that ineffable Apple feeling, a sense of polish that helps justify the $2,000 price tag. The hinge in particular is satisfyingly smooth, closing and opening with a comforting magnetic click. Compared with the Galaxy Z Fold 8 or Xiaomi 18 Fold, the Duo just feels better.

But part of that is down to the Duo’s big drawback: its weight. At first it feels encouraging, the reassuring heft of all that glass and metal. Then I started using the phone, and I realized it’s just plain heavy. It weighs more than all of its rivals — even ones with larger screens — and any attempt to use the Duo one-handed makes that obvious quickly. It’s a little thicker than some other foldables, too, though in practice that bothers me far less.

The squat shape won’t be for everyone. The Duo is even shorter and wider than the Z Fold 8, though almost identical in dimensions to Xiaomi’s 18 Fold. I’m a fan of this design, which is both cute and comfortable when folded shut and gives you a natural choice of portrait or landscape orientations when open. The major downsides are that the short cover screen makes some apps awkward to use, and it’s wide when you need to stretch across to the other side — a problem worsened by some of Apple’s software choices. More on that later.

And while the Duo’s IP68 rating is an obvious advantage over much of the competition (only Google and Honor can match it), we’ve not seen many recent Android foldables struggle with hinge and display damage quite like the Duo. It’s still not clear how widespread Duo screen failures really are — they don’t seem to be as ubiquitous as Samsung’s first-generation failures back in 2019 — but non-impact damage like this is almost unheard of in modern Android foldables. It’s a reminder that the Duo is still a first-gen product while some Android rivals are into their eighth iteration.

The screen is the Duo’s smartest hardware trick, and easily my favorite thing about the phone compared with other foldable phones. No rival offers anything like the “nano-texture” (read: matte) finish on the inner screen, which is easy on the eyes in more ways than one.

Crucially, it also helps mask the phone’s crease, which isn’t quite invisible but is well-hidden. The Duo’s crease is somewhere in the middle of the Android pack: subtler than Google’s and Honor’s, more obvious than Samsung’s. Oppo’s near-invisible crease remains the best, but not by much. The Duo’s matte screen means it’s harder than most to see (though visible from an angle), but it’s still easy enough to feel, and a couple of friends have immediately remarked on it when trying the phone. Still, I don’t want to over-egg it: The Pixel 11 Pro Fold is probably the only one out of this year’s foldables with a crease I’d say is a problem. The Duo’s crease is easy to ignore.

I’d actually say the Duo’s under-display camera is more of an annoyance. It’s not only inside an extra-pixelated circle of screen, but that’s the only patch without the matte coating, which makes it a little more distracting. I can mostly tune it out, but not entirely. I’d probably prefer a regular selfie camera tucked right into the corner, as on the Xiaomi 18 Fold and a few others, but I suspect opinions will differ here.

Finally, the Duo benefits from stylus support, letting you use a USB-C Apple Pencil on the central screen. This isn’t unique — Samsung used to offer the same, and both of Honor’s and Oppo’s latest foldables work with their styli — but plenty of the current Android crop don’t offer the option. I don’t have an Apple Pencil, so I haven’t been able to test it myself, but my colleague Allison is clearly a fan.

The iPhone Duo’s cameras, like those on most foldables, are fairly basic, with a pair of 48-megapixel rear lenses, one main and one ultrawide. It’s a setup comparable to the Z Fold 8, and both phones’ cameras are good, but not great. Most other Android foldables (including Samsung’s Z Fold 8 Ultra) instead offer triple rear cameras, netting you a big boost in photographic flexibility. They often use larger sensors than either Apple or Samsung, so their main cameras are better, too. Still, Vivo is the only manufacturer getting close to slab flagship quality in its foldable cameras, and its hardware lags behind in a few other respects that would prevent it from being my foldable recommendation overall.

As for selfies, the front-screen camera is pretty basic, but you can take better shots using the rear cameras by opening the phone up and flipping it round. That under-display camera is worse than a regular selfie camera, but good enough so long as you only use it for video calls.

As for battery, Nilay and Allison had different experiences in our Duo review. I’ve mostly found the battery long-lasting, easily running a full day of mixed use. It’s got a higher capacity than either of Samsung’s foldables, so that’s no real surprise. It still pales in comparison to the two-day battery of Honor’s Magic V6, but once you’re past lasting a day, I think you get diminishing returns anyway.

Software support and multitasking

So far, the Duo looks like a competitive foldable, albeit a little middle-of-the-pack. It beats its rivals in some hardware areas, falls behind in others, and has one truly unique selling point in the matte foldable display.

Unusually for Apple, the software is what lets it down.

The biggest problem isn’t Apple’s own software, but everyone else’s: Most apps still aren’t optimized for the Duo. In the best case, that means apps that don’t make full use of the Duo’s new right-hand rail, showing an empty black bar instead of app controls. Worse are the ones that don’t even scale to the larger screen — apps like Bluesky or Duolingo can use the whole display on other foldables, but appear in thin strips with huge black bars on the Duo.

This will improve with time. I’ve seen Google Maps, Google Translate, and Instagram update in the last few days alone, and no doubt more will follow. Some are already better on the Duo: Slack uses a helpful desktop-style two-column layout, while on Android foldables you just get the mobile UI but bigger. But for now at least, most apps run better on my Android foldables than on my Duo.

OS-level improvements are harder to predict. At first I loved the idea of Apple moving key controls to the right-hand edge, but it takes up so much space that it leaves the Duo’s cover screen feeling smaller than it needs to: You get all the awkward stretching of a wide phone without the expansive screen space. Samsung and Xiaomi’s wide foldables may be about the same size, but in use they feel much bigger. I wonder how many software developers will follow Google’s lead in app optimization — it essentially ignored the right rail entirely while updating Google Maps, instead just spreading the map to the edge of the screen. It feels bigger and better than most other Duo apps as a result.

And this is partly the Android user in me, but the lack of a persistent back-swipe gesture seems to grate more on the Duo than on other iPhones. Sometimes, moving backward in an app requires a button in the right rail, sometimes one in the top-left corner, sometimes a swipe from the left-hand edge of the screen. It’s annoyingly inconsistent, and more often than not requires stretching across the phone’s width, whether it’s open or closed. Being able to swipe back from either side of the screen gives Android foldables a huge advantage in one-handed use.

As for multitasking, the Duo is well behind the competition. You can run two apps at once in split-screen, but only in landscape mode, and each must take up exactly half the display. Compare this to Oppo, which allows you to fluidly move between multiple split-screen apps and floating windows; or Xiaomi, which allows up to six apps to run side by side in split-screen, and Apple’s implementation feels downright basic. These are the extreme end of Android, and probably overkill for most (they certainly are for me), but I’d take them over Apple’s half-hearted multitasking any day.

Apple hasn’t waded into the foldable market and fixed all its flaws. If anything, “crackgate” is proof that it’s still playing catch-up with the Android alternatives, which have a few years of fine-tuning behind them. Many are still lighter, and thinner, and have subtler creases than the Duo, or bigger batteries and better cameras. In broad strokes, though, this hardware is up to scratch — and, crucially, on par with its most direct worldwide rival, the Galaxy Z Fold 8.

For now, though, Android has the software edge. Google has worked hard to make its OS adaptable to various screen sizes so most apps take full advantage of the bigger inner screen while individual OEMs have designed ambitious multitasking tools. That isn’t yet true for iOS, and some of Apple’s own software tweaks in the OS make things more awkward still. It’s those that I’m worried about long term. The best thing about foldables is their flexibility — something Apple itself often lacks. If the Duo is going to catch up to Android, Apple might have to adapt.

Photography by Dominic Preston / The Verge