Apps worth unfolding

The page is the format that gains most from more glass, and for most people the pages are already here. Novels reflow and barely care. The formats Amazon lists separately — magazines, graphic novels, textbooks, Print Replica titles — are laid out to a fixed page and cannot reflow their way out of a small one, which makes them a zoom-and-pan exercise folded and a page unfolded.

Handwriting, PDFs and an infinite canvas, none of which has ever fitted on a phone at a size you could work at. Marking up a page means zooming until the paragraph being marked up is off-screen; unfolded, the page can sit at something near its own proportions and the margin is still recognisably a margin.

A multi-track editor bought once rather than subscribed to, built around the one element that is pure width: the timeline. Every clip you can see is a clip you are not scrubbing to find, which makes the extra inches a straightforward increase in how much of an edit is in front of you at once.

RAW editing where the filmstrip, the adjustment and the photograph can finally be on screen together. On a folded phone one of those three is always hidden behind the other two, and the cost is not convenience — it is that you are judging an edit you cannot see whole.

Markdown notes with no account to create, in a sidebar that has somewhere to go. Note apps are the clearest case of a phone layout being a compromise: the list of notes and the note itself take turns on one screen, and unfolded they stop taking turns.

Tapbots' Mastodon client, from the people who built Tweetbot, and the kind of app that has always had more columns than a phone could show. A timeline is a single narrow river on a phone by necessity rather than by design, and the extra width is where the design was always pointing.

A flight tracker with an honest use for each screen size, which is rarer than it sounds: the gate number and the countdown are a glance, and the map and the timeline are a sit-down. Folded and unfolded are two genuinely different jobs here rather than two sizes of the same one.

The honest entry, and last on purpose. A podcast player is audio with a list in front of it, and audio does not care how wide the screen is. It earns its place on the chapter list, the queue and the show notes having room to be read at the same time, which is a real gain and a small one.

A vector sketchbook on an infinite canvas, which is the feature most obviously limited by the window you view it through. Infinity seen through a phone is a keyhole: the canvas was never the constraint, the viewport was, and this is the entry where more viewport is the whole of the improvement.

Sheet music, where page size is not a preference but the product. Music written for a music stand has a size it is legible at, and everything a phone-sized reader does — reflowing, cropping, half-pages — is a workaround for not having that size. Unfolded, rather less of the workaround is needed.