Split View on iPhone Duo: two apps side by side

Split View has been on iPad for years. iPhone Duo is the first iPhone to get it. In Apple’s words, it “allows users to open two apps side by side on iPhone for the first time.” This page covers what it does, where its limits are, and what a well-made app does when it only has half the screen.

What Apple shows

Apple’s example on the iPhone Duo page is ordinary on purpose: “Now you can browse your Photos library on one side, and drag a picture into Mail on the other.” Two apps, each on its own side of the fold, with drag and drop between them. It is the first time an iPhone has done this, and it only happens on the inner display. Closed, iPhone Duo is a one-app phone like every iPhone before it.

How you start it

With the phone open, drag the app you are using from the home indicator, the bar at the bottom edge, toward one side. It takes that half of the display, leaving the other half for a second app.

That description comes from hands-on videos and the simulator in Apple’s developer tools. Nobody outside Apple has a phone yet, so treat the exact gesture as provisional until October 23.

The limits

g.O.R.i, who posted a hands-on video the day after the announcement, found the first limit straight away: the divider does not move. The split is half and half, always. There is no way to give one app more room.

The second limit is the number of apps: two, on the inner display. Android Authority, writing about what the Duo means for foldable apps in general, noted that Apple restricts multitasking to two apps side by side on the open display.

One more detail you will notice. iOS 27 puts an app’s back buttons, tabs and toolbars in a column down the edge of the screen. In Split View each app’s column goes to its outer edge: the left app’s controls on the left, the right app’s on the right. The same app looks mirrored depending on which side it is on.

What a good app does with half the screen

Each half of the open display is roughly the width of the closed phone. An app that has been adapted for iPhone Duo notices and goes back to its phone layout, instead of trying to squeeze a two-column design into one column’s width.

• Inoreader switches back to its compact phone layout when it shares the screen.
• Agent HUD keeps to its own half, with nothing on the hinge.
• The Gift Journal uses the other app: with Safari open beside it, you can drag a product link straight into its capture box.
• Bunny Lau’s Tweed Browser sketches show a browser doing the same, with a slimmer page and a vertical sidebar.

Those are what the developers have shown, mostly in the simulator. Every app and idea on FoldHunt that has a Split View layout carries the Split View label, and they are collected on the Split View page.

One game treats it as a trap. Monster, Ink. is about staying off your phone, so if you snap a second app in beside it, the monster eats your city.

What we don’t know yet

Whether an app that has not been updated for iPhone Duo can go into Split View, and what it looks like there, is something we have not seen confirmed. Neither is how well drag and drop works between apps from different developers. Both wait for the hardware on October 23. In the meantime, how apps that aren’t updated run on iPhone Duo covers the full-screen case, and the poses guide covers the other four ways to hold the phone.