Sagoma on the iPhone Duo

The iPhone Duo arrives on 23 October. Sagoma, Sagoma Pro and Sagoma Link already run on it, and the work shipped before the hardware did.

The easy thing to do with a folding phone is nothing. An app built for one screen will open on the inner display, stretch to fill it, and look like a phone app that has been pulled at the corners. Lines of text run the width of a paperback page. A list of 1,394 exercises becomes a single column with a hand-span of white space on either side. It works, and it wastes the thing you paid for.

We treated the inner display as two panes rather than one large one.

In Sagoma Pro, the roster sits on the left and the client you are reading sits beside it. You are not pushing a screen onto a stack and popping back out to pick the next person. The same is true of the morning brief, of messages, and of the exercise you are working on while the rest of the programme stays visible next to it. The four tabs become a sidebar, because a tab bar is a compromise for a narrow screen and the inner display is not one.

Sagoma Link does the same with its five tabs. The consumer app does it with the places where you are comparing one thing against another, which is most of what a physique app asks you to do: this week against last, the plan against what you actually ate.

None of this is a separate version. It is the same app, the same account, the same subscription. Unfold the phone and the second pane is there; fold it and it is a phone app again.

One honest note about how this was built. We do not have the hardware either. Every bit of this was written against the simulator and Apple's Device Hub, and there is a specific claim we made in an early draft of this post that turned out to be false when we actually looked at a rendered screen, so we deleted it. If something is wrong on a real Duo on 23 October, write to us and we will fix it rather than explain it.