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.
Every list here ends with an honest entry, placed last to mark where the reasoning gives out. This one is made of nothing else. The device is on sale and the claims being made for it are about to be checked by people holding one, which makes this the right week to be specific about where more glass changes very little.
The pattern is consistent enough to state. An app gains from the fold when two things need to be visible at the same time, or when something it handles has a fixed size of its own — a page, a frame, a map, a timeline. An app gains nothing when it is already one column of text at a comfortable measure, or one picture being worked on, or audio. Widening that column does not improve it, and past a point it makes it harder to read.
The order runs from apps that gain nothing to apps that gain a little. None of this is criticism. Being the right size already is not a fault, and every app here is on another list for something it does well.
- 1
Instapaper
Instant Paper, Inc.
The oldest idea in reading apps and still the cleanest: strip the article to text, store it, read it when there is time. A column of type has a width it is comfortable at, and that width has nothing to do with the device around it — a wider screen spends the difference on margins. The queue gains; the reading does not.
- 2
Medium: Read & Write Stories
A Medium Corporation
Long articles with no layout of its own to speak of beyond the text, which makes it the plainest version of the same point. Extra width here buys a longer line to find your way back along at the end of, which is a problem typography had worked out long before there were screens to have it on.
- 3
Apple Books
Apple Distribution International
Reflowed text, which fits itself to whatever it is given and is therefore indifferent by design to how much that is. The fixed-layout titles behave completely differently, and they are the reason reading has a list of its own; the novels are the reason this app is on this one.
- 4
Photoshop Express Photo Editor
ADOBE SYSTEMS SOFTWARE IRELAND LIMITED
A crop, a straighten and a filter, applied to one picture with no panel of adjustments that needs to stay in view. The gain is that the picture is larger while you look at it. That is real, and it is the same gain the picture would get from any larger screen anywhere, which is rather the point.
- 5
Snapseed: Photo Editor, Camera
Google LLC
Tools applied by dragging a finger across the image, with the controls getting out of the way while the gesture happens. The design already assumes the photograph should have the whole screen, so a bigger screen gives a bigger photograph rather than a different arrangement of the app.
- 6
InShot - AI Video Editor
SHANTANU PTE. LTD.
Editing clips that are going to be watched on a phone, in the aspect ratio that assumes one. The preview is larger unfolded and the timeline has more room, both of which help, but the finished thing is a tall rectangle made for the folded screen — the work and the result point in opposite directions.
- 7
Tripadvisor: Plan & Book Trips
Tripadvisor
Reviews, photographs and bookings, which amounts to a list of places with a great deal attached to each. More results visible at once is a genuine convenience and the honest end of this: nothing about choosing where to eat was waiting for a second pane to become possible.
The selection and the order are ours. Each entry is written from that app’s own App Store listing, linked beside it, and this page from Apple's iPhone Duo product page. Drafted with AI assistance and checked back against those sources before publishing; the disclosure page explains how. The iPhone Duo has been on sale since 23 October 2026 and nothing here has been seen running on one, so what each entry says about the fold is an argument rather than a test.