Apps built on a line that runs left to right
Video and audio editors, where the interface is a horizontal thing and the screen is the only limit on how much of the edit you can see at once.
A timeline is the one interface element that converts width directly into capability. Everything else on a phone can be stacked, collapsed, or put behind a tab; a timeline cannot, because its whole job is to show duration, and duration is measured in pixels across. Zooming out to see the shape of an edit means the clips are too small to grab. Zooming in to work on a clip means the shape is gone.
So these apps are the clearest case the site has. None of them needs new features on a phone that opens — they need the thing they have always needed, which is more inches between the left edge and the right one. Every clip visible is a clip you are not scrubbing to find.
The list mixes video and audio, because the constraint is the same in both and the audio apps are the ones usually left out of it.
- 1
LumaFusion
Video editing · Luma Touch LLC
A multi-track editor bought outright rather than subscribed to, and the one on this list that most obviously runs out of room: video, audio and graphics tracks stacked up, with a magnetic timeline underneath. Every track is a row, every row costs height, and the preview has to go somewhere.
- 2
Ferrite Recording Studio
Wooji Juice Ltd
Multi-track audio built for spoken word — podcasts, radio, voice-over — where an edit is a long sequence of small cuts. Spoken-word editing is navigation almost entirely: the cut you want is somewhere in an hour, and how fast you find it is a function of how much of the hour is drawn on screen.
- 3
GarageBand
Apple Distribution International
A full recording studio with touch instruments in front of it, and a track list that fills a phone long before it fills the project. The arrangement view is where a song stops being a set of takes and becomes a structure, and that view is the first thing a narrow screen takes away.
- 4
VN: Photo & Video Editor
Ubiquiti Labs, LLC
A multi-track timeline with the kind of tooling — auto captions, filler-word removal, speed ramping — that assumes a talking-head edit you are going through closely. Close work on a long clip is the exact case where zoomed-in and zoomed-out stop being the same job.
- 5
Filmmaker Pro - Video Editor
Tinkerworks Apps
A colour-coded timeline with unlimited clips, audio tracks, voiceovers and text overlays, and clips repositioned by dragging them. Colour-coding is a feature for telling rows apart at a glance, which presupposes the rows are on screen to glance at.
- 6
Splice - Video Editor & Maker
BENDING SPOONS OPERATIONS SPA
Trimming, overlays, masks and speed changes, in an editor aimed at getting something finished rather than at building a rig. Even a simple edit is a sequence, and the lightest timeline still wants to be read in one go rather than a window at a time.
- 7
Logic Remote
Apple Distribution International
The odd one out: it is a control surface for the Mac rather than an editor, offering a mixer, transport controls and a step sequencer. A mixer is strips side by side, and how many strips you can touch without paging is the whole value of using a second screen as the desk.
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.