Wait, what, why? Well, see…
The foldable phones of today have the same problem tablets had 10 years ago
Unfold a huge screen, get mobile phone experience
Back in the day, when the first iPad launched, people were just pointing at it and laughing — “It’s an oversized iPod!”. Sure, some people that bought them enjoyed reading books on them or just browsing the web on the larger screen. However, most people that got a tablet found themselves not using it, especially since big-screened phones were becoming more prominent.
It was much quicker and easier to pull out your phone for all those “let me just google something” moments, than to reach for a tablet. Looking at apps on a tablet was pretty pointless, because they were just inflated versions of the phone apps — not showing you more info, just showing you bigger content. And Kindles were the better choice for reading books, with their easy-on-the-eyes E Ink displays.
Was that a big deal? Well, look at it this way — over the past decade, Android tablets have been throwing everything plus the kitchen sink at us. Top-tier hardware, split screen, floating windows, included stylus, multi-speaker setups, et cetera, et cetera. Over these years, the iPad was constantly being criticized for having limited hardware, limited multitasking, no true stereo speakers. And Apple was painstakingly slow at adding or upgrading those features.
Yet, over these years, Android tablets were declining to a point where almost all manufacturers gave up on making them. And iPads have been on a steady rise, to the point where Apple now offers them in 6 flavors and has the gall to ask “premium laptop” money for them.
And yes, as a person who abandoned the iPad 10 years ago, but now uses an iPad every single day — I believe a lot of this is down to the app experience. I just have a reason to prefer to use an iPad over a phone — the big screen actually shows me more information. Or an iPad over a laptop — I can easily take it from room to room while doing anything else.
OK, let’s tie it back to foldables
Gaming? Sure… depends on which games, though. On FPS titles, the square aspect ratio can give you a very weird FOV — hampering peripheral vision and not even giving you a good view of your character’s weapon.
Now, hold on, I do have an olive branch in my hand — I understand that the big, square screens lend themselves very well to multi-tasking. But I have questions. Do you really dual-thumb multi-task on your phone so often that you can justify dropping ~$1,800 on one? If you do, sure, cool.
- Responsive design means the app can actively change its resolution, so it can easily travel from one screen to the other. However, this does not move any UI elements around, so many apps look weird, hampered or… bad.
- Adaptive design can swap between phone layout and tablet-like layout. We like this, we want this. Few developers do this because it’s hard continuous work to keep up with new models — adaptive design does need to be tailored to exact screen size and ratio.
The good news is that these design choices are not mutually-exclusive — you can use Adaptive design to have your app rearrange itself for an unfolded screen, and Responsive design to make sure everything fits right within the new resolution. Google apps — like your favorite Play Store — do use both Responsive and Adaptive.
So, what can Google do?
YouTube Studio did not get the Adaptive treatment
Yeah, that example with the Google Play Store above? Well, it doesn’t apply to quite a lot of apps. In fact, even the YouTube Studio app doesn’t seem willing to adapt from folded to unfolded state. I would guess it’s still pretty hard to implement these features.
What can be done? Fortunately, I am not a developer, but the armchair complainer here. Far as I can gather, it’s tough work for developers to implement and maintain a healthy combination of Responsive and Adaptive design. I do hope that Google is working on making this easier and easier with future Android updates.
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