Apple’s iPhone Fold multitasking plans don’t go nearly far enough

The iPhone Fold is the worst-kept secret in tech. We know so much about it at this point that YouTubers have been able to create 3D-printed mockups and lovingly paw at them on their channels. The device apparently looks like a squat iPhone when folded and an iPad mini when unfolded. And rumours suggest Apple has annihilated the screen crease too. Hurrah! What we know less about is the software experience. A new claim about iPhone Fold multitasking has me worried – yet also not remotely surprised, because what’s rumoured is so painfully Apple.

iPhone and iPad alike used to run iOS. In 2019, Apple decided its tablet software should be distinct and branded it iPadOS instead. Which, let’s face it, was probably better than pOS. Or big-o-iOS, which is what I’d have gone for.

Broadly, iPadOS became a superset of iOS, notably bolting on additional multitasking features. Over the years, most features that debuted only on one device later ended up on the other. Multi-window multitasking is an exception and hasn’t yet made the leap to iPhone. But when it comes to iPhone Fold multitasking, it absolutely should.

Two of a kind

Late last year, developer Jesai Tarun managed to get iPadOS running on his iPhone. Sort of. Certainly, his iPhone ended up with the kind of multitasking found only on iPads. And this furthered suggestions that iOS and iPadOS are a lot more similar than anyone realised – and that Apple essentially decides which features to make available depending on the device you’re using.

There are good reasons for that. Apple optimises for specific hardware, and not every feature is tuned for every device. Nor are they all appropriate. And while iPhone displays have grown from dinky to ginormous, they still lack the screen acres for flinging windows around like you can on a tablet.

But that argument collapses the moment you introduce a bigger screen. Like, say, the one on the iPhone Fold. Which, as noted earlier, will roughly match the iPad mini’s – and the iPad mini has full-fat windowed multitasking. Yet according to Bloomberg Chief Rumour Parper Mark Gurman, Apple isn’t going to do the obvious and let you run iPad apps and use iPad multitasking on an iPad-sized display on your iPhone Fold.

Why? Mostly because money. If your iPhone can comfortably do iPad things, you won’t buy an iPad. But it might also trigger awkward questions Apple would sooner avoid, such as why, if an iPhone Fold can run iPad apps on its larger screen, any iPhone can’t do the same when connected to an external display? So instead, Apple is set to – and this will come as no shock to anyone who has followed Apple for more than five minutes – arbitrarily hobble iPhone Fold software while creating unnecessary work for developers in the process.

Raising the sidebar

What we’re going to get is… sidebars. Exciting, eh? (Also, odd, given that Apple removed sidebars from a lot of iPad apps.) But that’s not all. There will also be a two-up mode. You know, like Split View on iPad. Hurroo.

Gurman says Apple will try to make it easy for developers to adapt their apps to the inner iPhone Fold display. The problem is whether enough of them will bother. For that to happen, the iPhone Fold needs to be a colossal success right out of the gate. Otherwise, developers are being asked to spend time optimising software for a niche device owned by a tiny fraction of the market. And we’ve seen how that ends. *cough*Vision Pro*cough* *cough*Touch Bar*cough*

What we apparently won’t get is full iPad apps, despite the iPhone Fold being perfectly capable of supporting them. So an iPad mini (from $499/£499) will happily run windowed iPad apps. An iPhone Fold (probably north of two grand) will not. Just as the iPad was held back for years, iPhone Fold risks being similarly hobbled by Apple’s reluctance to unleash the full multitasking potential of the hardware.

We may soon live in a world where an Apple laptop is powered by an iPhone chip, and an iPhone unfolds to reveal an iPad-sized display. Yet the best experience of the latter will be one that debuted on Apple gear in 2015 and that Android phones have had for years now. But Android has started to move on. Maybe Apple should too.

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