This year’s platform State of the Union sample app was a place to relax. An origami app. A place, as Marybeth of the Foundation Models team said, “to relax and be creative with paper.” The demo included creating paper craft projects from photos and a step-by-step folding tutorial. The whole thing was warm, leisurely and completely charming. This was also, almost certainly, not chosen by accident.
The art of folding.
At the time these demos were being presented, developers with access to the iOS 27 beta were already looking elsewhere. Sam Gold, a developer who reads Apple’s framework strings, found two words that did not appear in iOS 26: foldState And angleDegrees. The third discovery was arguably more specific: a new system key that returns the total number of built-in displays on a device. On every iPhone ever shipped by Apple, that number is one. The use case for an API that queries whether the answer can be something other than one is fairly obvious.
In the platform State of the Union, the emphasis on size change was also unusually strong. Apple announced that iOS apps will now support resizing in iPhone mirroring on the Mac, and for the first time, mirrored windows can be scaled horizontally, stretching to a landscape aspect ratio that no current iPhone natively produces. The resizable iOS simulator was introduced, allowing developers to test layouts in what Apple described as “a dynamic range of sizes and aspect ratios”. The phrase “design for a dynamic range of sizes and aspect ratios” appeared more than once in the session.
On the other side of the pond, Android foldable owners have spent seven years figuring out which of their apps work and which don’t. It’s not an experience Apple wants to repeat. In Apple’s field, it’s creating a need for how developers work before devices even exist. This is the message from PSOTU, which says it loud and clear: Stop thinking about building software for a specific piece of hardware. Design the software to suit different screen sizes and aspect ratios. It’s doing what it does best, which is taking advantage of the period between announcement and shipping of the device to get the entire developer community ready for it.
The hardware picture has been clear for months. The iPhone Ultra, the obvious name for this new form factor iPhone, is a book-style foldable with a reportedly 7.7- to 7.8-inch internal display and a 5.3- to 5.5-inch cover screen that opens to a 4:3 ratio closer to the iPad mini’s widescreen display. The starting price is reportedly around $2,000. Announced alongside the iPhone 18 Pro in September, mass production is targeted to ramp up in July with production at Foxconn. John Ternes, who will take over as CEO on September 1, will step out and cite this as his first major act in the role. He supervised its development. In this sense, he is both the new CEO and the architect of the device.
The paper craft demo at the State of the Union ended with a tutorial. The app walked users through each step: crease, fold, shape. There’s something almost too neat about choosing this as Sample App of the Year. Apple showed developers how to handle the Fold, then sent them code to prove it was real, then asked every developer in the ecosystem to redesign their apps for the resized Surface. Smart Play.
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