I Tested a Ridiculous Number of iPhone Duo Apps. Start Here. (Video)

Load a tape in Deck-Man, close your iPhone Duo, and the album starts playing. Open the phone and it stops, with clicks recorded from a real cassette player to sell the bit. I tested a ridiculous number of Duo apps ahead of launch, and these 25 are where I'd start on day one. The best fits are the ones that give the fold a job.

TypeDraw is the other app that feels built for this hardware. Unfolding the Duo opens a notebook where you type anywhere on the page or sketch with your finger, and the pages curl as you turn them. There's a virtual elastic band to stretch and snap when you need to fidget, and you can draw your own custom font and type with it. I'm assuming Apple Pencil works here once Apple adds Pencil support to the Duo later this month.

Planners use the postures well. Daylish maps the getting-ready and travel time around an appointment, and half-open it puts the current step above the fold and the next one below. The calendar is free, but alarms, timers, and smart routines need the paid Plus plan. SubManager tracks unlimited subscriptions for free, and a one-time upgrade can import them from screenshots. Calorific starts a food log from a photo, with the camera on one side of the fold and today's meals on the other. The nutrition numbers are estimates. Gentler Streak treats rest days as part of the plan and lets you tell it when you're sick or injured.

For photos, Obscura Pro Camera gives you manual exposure, focus peaking, a histogram, and a toggle for the outer display. Afterlight handles film-style presets, curves, and grain. HEVCut shrinks photos and videos on the device to free up storage, and lets you compare the smaller copy before you delete anything. Swatch This sends you hunting for specific colors (gold, beige, pine green, navy blue), and it almost landed in my upcoming games video.

Callsheet tells you where you've seen that actor before, with no ads or autoplay. It's like if IMDb was actually good. Its spoiler controls can hide episode titles. You get 20 searches free, then it needs a subscription. Sofa splits your lists and the selected item into two columns, NetNewsWire is a free, open-source RSS reader, and LookUp can scan a word off the page of a paper book and define it.

Flighty is one of my favorites, and its Pro tier shows whether your incoming plane is still on its way. Scratchbook covers all 63 national parks with scratch-off badges, photos, and field notes, and the first five parks are free. I think I've been to exactly one, and this app has me thinking about the next. Weather 360 tells you when to go running, gardening, or stargazing, and Sky Guide fills the unfolded screen with the night sky and works offline.

Not everything is a clean win. Overcast has Smart Speed, Voice Boost, and new searchable transcripts, but it's frustrated me for about a year. My Vinyl+ answers "Do I already own this?" at the record shop, though its collection values are rough Discogs marketplace estimates. Most of these apps split features between free and paid tiers. Meta got Duo updates out first for Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and its Muse AI agent app. I'm still waiting on TikTok and YouTube. Blab is a different kind of social app, built around daily prompts and 20 topic worlds.

If you're setting up a Duo, install Deck-Man and TypeDraw first. They're the two apps that make you want to open and close the phone.