We’ve made it to Friday! Or, as it’s known in certain corners of the internet, iPhone Duo launch day. If you got your pre-order in early and your foldable phone arrives today, congrats! For everyone else, you can still enjoy the weird, wonderful and occasionally gimmicky apps showing off the potential of Apple’s newest platform. More on that below.
Plus, how to transfer your authentication apps and a trip down memory lane with the beloved Walkman that inspired one of my favorite Duo apps.
It was the summer of 2008. “The Dark Knight” was in theaters, Rihanna was topping the charts and that one friend you knew with an iPhone couldn’t stop showing you his new lighter app. And his new beer glass app. And his fart app.
When the App Store debuted, developers turned phones into all sorts of weird and wild things. It was a brief, glorious era of experimentation with touchscreens and apps of questionable usefulness.
Now, the iPhone Duo has brought back some of that same wonderfully ridiculous app development. Except this time, the phone opens and closes. And you know what opens and closes? A Walkman. An accordion. A refrigerator.
I've been testing some of the weirdest and wildest new Duo apps, not because they’re especially useful to me but just because they show the power of a new form factor and software. Here are some of my favorites, broken into three categories.
Household objects
Toastie: Turn your Duo into a toaster and make fake grilled cheese. Drag cheese and other ingredients onto bread, then close the phone like a panini press and listen to the sizzle. Or stick some real cheese between the screens and see what happens. (Please don't. AppleCare doesn't cover dairy.)
Phridge: That’s fridge, but with a ‘ph.’ Open your phake rephrigerator to move phake phood and drinks around inside it. It even makes a cooling sound.
Duometry: A game that turns your phone into a protractor. Match the angle of your folding phone to the angle on the screen. I’m surprisingly bad at it, but it’s a great way to teach kids about geometry.
Musical band
Deck-Man: This one is really fun every time. It turns the Duo into an old-school cassette Walkman, complete with rewind and fast-forward sounds. You even have to close the phone to play music and sometimes your “tape” strands get tangled and you need to turn the cassette spool. Sadly, you can’t use your Apple Pencil. (Yet.)
DuoBox: Your folding phone is now an accordion. Not a particularly good one, and the gimmick gets old after a few minutes. But yes, I’m accepting tips. Preferably enough to pay off the phone.
Piano Duo: A little piano game that takes advantage of the folding display. Fold the phone into laptop mode, and tiles fly at you on the upper screen while you hit the corresponding color piano keys on the lower screen. I could start a band with my phone. A deeply unpopular band.
Game night
FleetFold and Battlefleet Duo: Two different takes on Battleship. Set up your Duo in laptop mode again and drag your fleet onto the top screen. Play against someone online or pass the phone to a friend for their turn. I think I sunk my own battleship.
Penalty Area: Same laptop position, but now the top screen becomes a soccer goal and the lower screen becomes the field, complete with a ball to kick.
The best part of these apps isn't necessarily their usefulness. It's that developers are experimenting with a new kind of computer, just like they did when the original iPhone arrived. Some ideas are silly and completely impractical. And like those lighter and fart apps, many will probably disappear.
But I think all these apps point to what folding phones can actually become, in a way the Android app ecosystem hasn’t managed to do, even with a seven-year head start.
Gotta go, my phake grilled cheese is ready in the phake toaster and I need to grab a phake soda from my phake phridge.
At the end of every month, I inevitably get some version of this message from my bookkeeper (let’s call him Booky McBookkeeper): “Joanna, what exactly was this charge, and what project was it for?”
Mercury is trying to eliminate some of that back-and-forth with Mercury Books, its new accounting software built directly into your Mercury account.
That means your banking, invoices, bill pay, receipts and transaction details can all live together. Mercury Books can automatically categorize and reconcile transactions as you go, cutting down on manual work—and, ideally, the number of “What was this?” emails from Mr. McBookkeeper.
And you don’t have to wait for your books to catch up to understand how the business is doing. You can pull current P&Ls, cash-flow reports and balance sheets for a much more up-to-date view.
Basically: fewer spreadsheets, fewer mystery transactions, more useful numbers. I have a feeling Booky McBookkeeper is really going to like this.
Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided through Choice Financial Group and Column N.A., Members FDIC.
We’ve all been there: You get a new shiny phone, satisfyingly register your face (or fingerprint on the iPhone Duo) and bask in the glory of your fresh piece of tech. Then you realize you need to get into an important account, but your two-factor authentication app is stuck on your old phone. Or worse, you already traded in that other phone.
Before you say goodbye to your old phone, here's how to prepare for and transfer two of the most common authenticator apps.
Microsoft Authenticator
On your old phone:
iPhone: Go to Settings > iCloud account > Saved to Cloud > toggle on Microsoft Authenticator and make sure iCloud Drive and iCloud Keychain are also toggled on.
Android: Go to the Microsoft Authenticator app > tap the three dot menu > select Settings > make sure Cloud Backup is turned on. You will need to select a personal Microsoft account to store the backup.
On your new phone:
Download the app and sign in to your Microsoft account(s) and tap Begin Recovery. All of the accounts should sync to the new phone.
Google Authenticator
On your old phone:
Open Google Authenticator and look for a small green cloud icon with a check mark in the middle. This indicates your codes are synced to your Google account. (If you don’t use cloud syncing, tap the three lines in the upper left on your old phone and select “Transfer accounts” and “Export accounts.” It will generate a QR code.)
On your new phone:
Download the app and sign into the same Google account. Your codes should automatically sync. (If you’re transferring manually, select “Transfer accounts” in the app and scan the QR code displayed on the old phone.)
As someone who switches between phones more than the average person, I can assure you these tricks come in handy. Keep this newsletter in your back pocket—you’ll thank me later.
As I mentioned above, I’ve loved turning the cutting-edge Duo into an old-school Walkman with the Deck-Man app. So I reached out to the developer to ask about his original Walkman, what made him love it so much and why he wanted to bring it back to life on a $2,000 folding phone.
Name: Vidit Bhargava
What's your old thing? Sony Walkman WM-FX141 AM/FM
What year is your old thing from? 1998
Why do you love your old thing? I love all things analog and physical media in general. With the Walkman and cassette tapes, as with other forms of physical media, what you own is yours. I enjoy that freedom that comes with owning something. My music wasn’t at the behest of record labels signing deals with streaming services. Once I bought it, I could listen to it forever, even 25+ years later.
I also grew up buying a lot of cassettes—I had the cassette tapes for practically every popular Bollywood movie in the ’90s. Every time I listen to the Walkman it sends me back to my childhood. The nostalgia is strong with these things.
Fun fact: “App” was voted word of the year for 2010 by the American Dialect Society, only two years after the App Store launched on Apple devices. For those of you wondering, the 2025 word of the year was “slop.” All WOTY since 1990 can be found here.
This newsletter was written and curated by Joanna Stern and Adele Lowitz.
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