But will you gain anything by building for it? Will you see noticeably more users or people choosing another alternative because you didn't specifically building the app for Duo? At least if it doesn't outright break.
He talks about a Steve Jobs story where he moved a piece of furniture and notes that the back, which would be against the wall, was still finished as nicely as the front, even though you’d never see it day to day.
He compares this to Apple products being beautiful on the inside as well as the outside. Even the cheapest products are like this.
There’s another story going around about the new guy, from his early days working on an Apple display. He was inspecting a supplier and discovered that the screws in the back had 35 grooves on the head versus the 25 specified. He ended up arguing with the supplier and making them fix it. Not because the grooves were core to the product, but because it’s important to get things right.
In short, craftsmanship. Build things well. Take care of the details. Make your stuff beautiful even if only a few people will ever see it. Even if nobody will ever see it.
Sure, an app maker could say, the Duo will be a small percentage of our user base, who cares if our app looks like shit to them. And quite a few of them will, I’m sure. And people will notice that these apps look and work like garbage on some of their friends’ and families’ phones. And this attitude will not confine itself to this one thing. These same app makers will say, who cares if this button is a little clipped. Who cares if the screen flashes during launch. Who cares if it takes five seconds to launch. Will we lose a noticeable number of users?
And that’s how we end up with legions of apps that are hot trash. Many of them will do fine despite that. My health insurance’s app is hot trash and they’re not losing me as a customer. But the company that makes the hardware and software their app runs on is way more successful than they are. Obviously a big part of that is down to what industry they’re in. But some of it is because Apple finishes the back of their furniture.
But you're kinda proving my point. I don't disagree with having pride in your work and obsessing over details, but as you say, it won't matter in the end. And so, many will probably find themselves disappointed with the Duo, as there is little reason for developers to care. And then many won't.
I’m saying it does matter in the end. Partly because small numbers still count, partly because the “who cares” attitude gets infectious and impacts everything. App makers aren’t just going to ignore the Duo while making everything else perfect. They’re going to ignore the Duo and ignore graphical glitches and have terrible launch time and terrible accessibility and on and on. At the end of the day, they may have enough of a captive audience that they still make good money, but that’s not the same as it not mattering at all. A good app is a competitive advantage, even if the effect is just in the margins.
And my point is more about us as individuals. As a user I want better apps. As a developer I care about doing things well, which translates directly into career success.
I would get a little bit of joy if a duo user noticed the effort I put into making my app work well on their device. Why put effort into anything? Your take is bordering dangerously on cynicism. :)
We're not talking about 0/1 here. There's making sure the app works and looks ok on the Duo and then there's building out Duo specific features. The works/looks ok is generally pretty easy with new devices. Just build with the new SDK and fix places where the app wasn't doing something likely already suggested by Apple. A big one will be safe areas which people often ignored except on the top and bottom.
You could say this about every QoL feature though. That’s not a reason to not do it though, it adds up and at some point other apps that do bother to make their apps as good as possible will become more popular than yours.
Duo users also likely have disposable income to spend on in app purchases, maybe click on ads to purchase things, and other monetization. So I do think it's worth building for it.
Will you see noticeably more users or people choosing another alternative because you didn't specifically building the app for Duo?
I haven't done iOS development in a long time, but my understanding is that if your iPhone app is designed well and uses all of Apple's recommended methods, adjusting for different screen sizes and orientations is fairly easy.
If you decided to go cheap/easy/dumb from the outset, then you made your bed, and now you get to lie in it.
Not really. It's an iPad + iPhone. That's hardly exotic. Both of those product categories sell very well. People who own an iPad mini and an iPhone have every reason to consider this for the merged cost.
I use an iPad Mini every day (I’m on it, right now). I also have a big iPad Pro, that I never use.
It’s likely that I will end up getting a Duo, eventually. I’m not in a hurry. I’ll bet that there will be teething problems.
I suspect all my apps will run OK on Duos. I have been designing for flexible iOS screen dimensions since Day One (2012). It was a habit I already had, from MacOS development, and all my apps work in landscape mode (It’s shocking, how many apps you can break, simply by turning the phone 90 degrees). Looks like an open Duo is about the same dimensions as running an iOS app on Mac (by default—you can easily resize Mac iOS app windows).
I am interested in seeing if I can leverage running on inside and outside screens. That might be interesting (but I don’t know if that’s possible. They probably switch off the outer screen, when the device is open).
I’ll bet that Apple ships an Apple Pen Mini, for Duos.
It is indeed a niche product. Its price reflects the sales expectations of Apple.
But its form factor has been validated for almost a decade now from other manufacturers. So iPhone Duo will do fine. It will not surpass a slab iPhone but fine.
Vision Pro was a completely new beast, the hardware was not there, the market was not there.
It's worth noting that "niche" in this case means ~10M in its first year, comparted to an estimated 250M Apple smartphone shipments in 2027. So far, Apple has sold ~600K Vision Pro in total.
Also, supporting Duo is not an enormous lift if you're already supporting resizable windows, as developers are required to do for OS 27.
Yeah the market had shown that anything bulkier/heavier than a pair of regular glasses is not acceptable. Not sure why apple released it unless it is a glorified dev kit that would allow devs imagine a use case for a product that is 10 years away.
> I know exactly one person who has a foldable phone and I live in sf.
If we're comparing anecdotes, when I lived in the states far from sf many tech people I knew had folding phones. They loved them and I was curious, but I like iOS.
My only concern is that they'll sell out so quickly for so long that I'll have to wait for the iPhone Duo Two-o because they won't be easy to get until like May 2027.
Developer here. Apple often rejects app submissions if the app doesn't look optimized for some iPhone device or iPad device. So won't be surprised if they reject new apps and updates for not being optimized for the Duo. This could be their way of getting developers to comply.
That seems like a tough road. They've never been able to enforce that iPhone app makers build an iPad-compatible version or vice versa, and this looks exactly like that scenario.
It's mostly enforced, the only exception being apps with a legitimate iPhone-only hardware dependency.
iPhone apps must function on iPad in iPhone-compatibility mode, apps must support window resizability as of OS 27, and apps can't detect iPad and refuse to run. And I don't think this is new, but setting the target to iPhone-only doesn't prevent iPhone apps from running on iPad.
I really wanted to use it as my primary computing display, but as is almost always the case with Apple, the amazing hardware was hamstrung by the crippled OS.
Even just being able to use it as a generic display i.e. with a Nintendo Switch would have been amazing.
Founding a start-up with VC money, dumping the bag into someone else's lap, and then riding off into the sunset is a very different skill set from actually growing and running a company that is no longer early stage.
Look at Zuckerberg. He may have been good as a founder, but if he didn't have super voting shares, and if Meta's cash flow from their ad business wouldn't mask how poor his strategic decision making has been, he would have been pushed out as CEO years ago.
Ok makes sense I guess, how does the karma help when they try to push the narrative on things? Isn't the comments still dependent on votes, or do users with higher karma get better visibility in the comments? Seems like a broken system that this is even possible
To people saying its replacing Lovable. It's still missing the ability to deploy right from the app with a backend ready to go. I'm sure it will get there tho.
Does it also show usage? I think it's pretty ridiculous we have to install 3rd party packages/implement it ourselfs just to see how much gas is left in the tank basically. Or constantly check the usage tab on the web, but still.
To clarify on what the others mentioned: `/usage` and `/status` in the CLI do give you basic session token counts.
But regarding khoury's original point about the actual "gas in the tank" (billing/account balance)—no, my tool doesn't show that either.
Since `claude-devtools` strictly parses your local `~/.claude/` logs and makes zero network calls, it doesn't have access to your Anthropic account to pull your actual dollar balance.
What it does provide is high-resolution context usage. Instead of just a total session count, it breaks down tokens per-turn (e.g., how many tokens were eaten by reading a specific file vs. the tool output). It helps you manage your context window locally, but for billing, you're unfortunately still stuck checking the web dashboard.
You’re overlooking Hotwire, PWA as a first-class concept, and Hotwire Native — the easiest way to take a functioning web app and migrate it to native mobile apps on both iOS and Android. I’d encourage you to take a fresh look at the new Rails technologies introduced in Rails 7 and Rails 8. You may find that the current Rails stack is the best fit for most, though not all, cloud applications that need a web client along with iOS and Android clients.
In 2024, I launched for a client a Rails platform powered by Hotwire that has thousands of users. Thanks to Jumpstart Rails working out of the box with Jumpstart iOS and Android, the web app views were reused in native iOS and Android apps which drastically sped up initial launch and reduces ongoing maintenance. In other words, much less effort than if I had used Rails as an API with React or something similar.
And I've kept my eyes on Rails UI since it was in beta, and I was poking around with it a couple weeks ago and the cool thing is it could be used on a project like the one above without clashing with anything.
I've done this! Given the right interface I was surprised at how well it did. Prompted it "You're controlling a character in Old School RuneScape, come up with a goal for yourself, and don't stop working on it until you've achieved it". It decided to fish for and cook 100 lobsters, and it did it pretty much flawlessly!
Biggest downside was it's inability to see (literally), getting lists of interact-able game objects, NPCs, etc was fine when it decided to do something that didn't require any real-time input. Sailing, or anything that required it to react to what's on screen was pretty much impossible without more tooling to manage the reacting part for it (e.g. tool to navigate automatically to some location).
People have been botting on Runescape since the early 2000s. Obviously not quite at the Claude level :). The botting forums were a group of very active and welcoming communities. This is actually what led me to Java programming and computer science more broadly--I wrote custom scripts for my characters.
I still have some parts of the old Rei-net forum archived on an external somewhere.
They detect bots but let a ton of them run free because any character having membership = revenue and an extremely significant chunk of active characters are bots. They nuked them all in 2011 I think and the game was nearly empty.
SirPugger's youtube channel has loads of videos monitoring various bot farms.
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