Shortlists for a phone that opens.
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Travel & outdoors
10 apps
Maps you can actually read
A map is the one document where zooming out to see where you are means zooming out until you cannot read it. More screen is not a nicety here; it is more map at a usable scale.
+2Music & audio
10 apps
Making music on a wider instrument
Audio does not care about screen size. Everything you do to audio — a timeline, a mixer, a keyboard, a page of music — is made of width, and a phone has been rationing it.
+2News & feeds
10 apps
News apps that stop being one column
Every feed reader ever designed has three panes — sources, headlines, article — and every phone version has spent its life pretending it has one. This is the category whose proper layout has existed for decades and has never fitted.
+2Drawing & design
10 apps
Drawing apps with a bigger window
An infinite canvas is only ever as big as the window you look at it through. On a folded phone that window is a keyhole, and almost every design decision in a mobile drawing app is an apology for it.
+2Video
10 apps
Video editing with room for the timeline
A video editor is a preview window and a timeline fighting over the same glass. Give it more glass and the fight stops — this is the category where the extra inches turn most directly into work you could not do before.
+2Photo editing
10 apps
Photo editing with the picture in view
Editing a photograph on a phone means choosing, at every moment, between seeing the picture and seeing the controls. That is the compromise the fold removes, and it is a bigger one than it sounds.
+2Writing
10 apps
Writing apps for long stretches of text
Writing on a phone has always been fine for a paragraph and miserable for a chapter. The difference is not the keyboard — it is how much of what you have already written you can see while you write the next bit.
+2Notes & handwriting
10 apps
Notes, handwriting and the bigger page
Note apps are where the phone's one-pane compromise shows most plainly: the list and the note take turns. Handwriting and PDF markup do not even get that far — they want a page at its own size.
+2Reading
10 apps
Reading on a screen that opens
Reflowing text barely notices the extra room. Everything laid out to a fixed page — comics, magazines, scanned pages, anything with a margin that means something — notices immediately.
+2The shortlist
10 apps
Apps worth unfolding
The general list, and the one the rest of the site hangs off: apps where opening the phone changes what can be attempted, rather than apps that are merely larger when it does.
+2