Two weeks after the iPhone Duo went on sale, Apple has the number it wants you to hear. Well over 100,000 apps are now built for its first foldable, according to 9to5Mac, with thousands more arriving every day. It's a direct answer to the Duo's loudest launch-week criticism: that a $1,999 phone shipped with an app problem.
"It's been wonderful to see how quickly developers have embraced iPhone Duo, and we're grateful for their creativity and innovation," said Susan Prescott, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations. "Today there are well over 100,000 apps built for iPhone Duo already live on the App Store, and thousands of optimized apps are being added to the store each day." Apple says more than 2,000 developers attended over 50 in-person workshops in 19 cities in the last month to get their apps ready. Recent additions include Microsoft's Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook, plus Zoom, Etsy, and Halide Mark III — and Google updated Maps for the Duo unusually fast for a company that usually takes its time with Apple's new platforms.
The fine print matters, though. MacRumors confirmed that the 100,000 figure counts apps built with the iOS 27.1 SDK or later — apps that fill the full width of both displays and move their controls into the status bar. That's a real bar, but it's mostly a rebuild bar, not a redesign bar: apps built with Apple's standard SwiftUI and UIKit components adapt largely on their own. And 100,000 is still a small slice of the millions of apps in the App Store.
The missing list is more telling than the milestone. Still not optimized, per MacRumors: DoorDash, Duolingo, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Starbucks, Venmo, Uber Eats, Bluesky, Delta, PayPal, and Steam. These are daily-driver apps, and the ones built with the iOS 26 SDK or earlier run centered on the Duo's inner display with black bars on either side. Optimized apps carry a "Made for iPhone Duo" badge on their App Store page — that's the thing to check before you judge the phone by its home screen.
For scale, Apple's last new platform did far worse out of the gate: the Vision Pro launched in February 2024 with just over 600 native apps, as noted in a comparison this week. The Duo's two-week total is roughly 170 times that — which says as much about how easy Apple made the transition as it does about developer enthusiasm.
What to watch: whether the daily-driver holdouts land before the Duo's return window closes next week, and whether "optimized" starts meaning genuinely foldable-aware layouts rather than SDK rebuilds. For anyone still deciding on the phone, the test isn't the 100,000 — it's whether your five most-used apps carry the badge.
— via 9to5Mac