Do you guys remember that one app, circa the beginning of the App Store in 2008, that was just a glass of beer on the iPhone?

Made by an actual magician, iBeer was like magic back then for just $2.99. You tilted the phone like a glass pretending to drink from it, and the phone’s novel accelerometer made it so the beer “drained” with foam and a pouring sound.

No problem solved, but it was fun and new. And fun and new allowed it to hit #1 on the App Store on day one and stay there for about a year. Plus, at its peak it was pulling in $10,000 to $20,000 a day for the guy. It passed 90M downloads.

Why?

Because the accelerometer was brand new, and iBeer was the first thing that made you feel it. It worked so well because people paid the $2.99 so they could hand their new iPhone to a friend and say “tilt it.” The gesture was the entire product and that in-real-life UGC demo was the marketing engine

Watching the release of Duo last week and then reading up on the 6 brand new gestures being made available to builders…well, I’ve been thinking about iBeer all week and how we can capture some of that 2008 magic ourselves.

Beyond stunning opening animations that are going viral, Apple has also handed us a $2000 billboard we can be on for free. People don’t need to share our app, they just need to open their phone and that’s a high-res public facing new surface we can be discovered on IF we’re thoughtful about it.

Again, we’ll get into some ideas in a second—it’s not just about folding phones.

Speaking of folding, yes Samsung has had folding phones for seven years and they weren’t shy to throw those punches when Apple announced theirs. But you all know exactly how this song and dance goes….Samsung build it but Apple perfect it and bring it to the mainstream US market. So, now that it’s available to Apple fans who’ve been dying for innovation come October 23rd…what will you do about it?

Because every new gesture Apple has shipped is a sharing inflection—and we’re getting 6 new ones. The first apps that give people a reason to use and show them off get the TikToks, that coveted App Store feature, and maybe even the press…and they’ll get it for free.

beehiiv is for builders, and I'm a builder.

And they just shipped an MCP, so now Claude can talk to my whole publication. My full archive, upcoming drafts, post stats, and segments. You can connect beehiiv to various LLMs in a matter of seconds.

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That's the shift with their MCP. You get an AI that actually understands your business and can act on it. It’s like I’ve added a full-time analyst, operator, strategist, and assistant to my team…which is just me.

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🥷 Build one Duo moment worth screen recording and showing friends before October 23. Pick your Duo gesture and brainstorm “when my user opens, closes or tents the phone, my app will <your unique trick here>”.

To be clear, this will not make your product good. A trick built on a new gesture has a job—to make your product worth talking about for a few weeks in a precious window where the whole internet is looking for things to talk about.

If your product underneath is bad your gesture is only throwing blitz on a flame without wood to keep it going.

But if your product is decent, there’s a wave of cheap distribution worth trying to catch. And there is a version of the gesture trick that does actually add real value on top. Take Netflix...

Apple spent more time on Netflix’s Duo app in the keynote than on their own TV app, which tells you how badly Apple wants third-party proof that the form factor matters. Here’s what Netflix built (you can watch it here in 60s)

→ Outer screen: Clips, their TikTok-style feed. You scroll on the small screen with one hand.

→ Unfold: the clip you were watching continues on the big screen, same spot, no reload.

→ Laptop pose: video moves to the top half, playback controls drop to the bottom half so the phone sits on a tray table and you don’t touch the picture.

→ Billboard: the big promo art on the home screen got these neat dynamic visual effects where movement made the art move.

Basically they built a full pose-to-behavior map.

Most people are going to start scrambling for the mandatory/table stakes build for Duo compatibility, aiming for “our app supports iPhone Duo”. But that’s not the growth play. Are you willing to get weird?

Let’s break down what the new gestures are and how to capitalize on them. Number four on using outward-facing “billboards” is huge and there’s a standalone viral business opportunity spelled out there too.

The thing that stops most people using a human-in-the-loop service is not knowing what's coming back. You brief it, you wait, and then you're negotiating with whatever lands.

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And you never leave your agent to do any of it. One line connects Tendem over MCP. Mention it mid-conversation, get a quote, approve, keep working.

Fun fact, Pull-to-refresh was invented by one guy, Loren Brichter, for Tweetie 2.0 in September 2009. It was just a Twitter client. That gesture though is now engrained in us and we do it everyday across Mail, Safari, Chrome, and every other feed you’ve ever touched. Apple gave him a Design Award and Twitter bought the company the next year.

Tinder’s iconic swipe came from Jonathan Badeen looking at a fogged bathroom mirror in 2012 and wiping it. “Swipe right” is a verb now and it’s used to buy stocks, learn languages, and pick daily moments in my app Little Moments.

Two great examples of a simple move people learn to repeat. A gesture becomes sticky and habitual and for anyone who’s just been in the iPhone ecosystem there are now six new ones to invent around and bring to them.

People love new things. And Apple users are going to be itching for new to show off to their friends when they go to dinner with their $2k Duo that it was worth it. The “check this out” moments will be real

→ When iOS 14 gave us widgets in 2020, there were 13.7 million installs of home screen customization apps in the first week. Widgetsmith made by just one dev sat at #1 on the store above Gmail and Netflix and has since passed 100 million downloads.

Widgetsmith went stratospheric because it just allowed people to do something new on their phone.

→ Then, when the iPhone 14 Pro gave us the Dynamic Island in 2022, another single dev Christian Selig added a silly pixel pet that walked around it inside his Reddit app. It hit 1.4M views on TikTok in days…again, because it was new and unique and people LOVE new and unique.

The pet thing became its own app Pixel Pals, which did 3.33 million installs and $625,000 in a single quarter. A novel gimmick riding new hardware.

→ On Android, a Dynamic Island clone passed 1 million installs just 3 months after Apple launched it. People in that ecosystem wanted the gesture so bad they installed a fake one.

→ Samsung’s whole Z Flip marketing motion is one gesture, the half-fold “FlexCam.” And the Z Flip hashtag has ~45.5 billion TikTok views and the Gen Z share of Z Flip4 buyers moved from 17% to 41%. The flip motion was novel, it allowed people to physically feel something, and that is a viral combo.

→ And when Apple features you for using their hardware in a unique way, best believe that growth lift is real. Data shows around +800% in weekly downloads for Game of the Day and +200% for Stories and Lists. On Vision Pro launch week, JigSpace got 14,000 installs in six days after being all over Apple’s launch materials. Apple is going to have and market a “Designed for iPhone Duo” shelf on October 23. Right now there are only three logos to put on it…meaning there’s space for you.

The window is the same every time guys. Hardware ships, the internet spends two weeks filming and sharing what it does, and whichever apps are in those videos get carried along. Then the window closes and it’s back to being a phone.

A study on three months of New York Times articles found that the most engaged with and shared content had nothing to do with usefulness or length. It was all about arousal. Content that made people feel awe, amusement, anger or anxiety got shared way more. Not that surprising but I mention it to say that should be your target emotion to capture in 1-3 seconds of gesture.

It’s why the Duo unfold clips went everywhere this week. People were in awe of that buttery design delivery and animation. When you brainstorm your move, remember that weird and unexpected = awe = screenshotted.

iBeer was weird. Pixel Pals was weird. You want to be the weird thing.

Just think about what this means.

A guy reading on a train with a Duo opened up like a book and on the outside of the phone facing everyone is the book’s cover.

For the first time ever an app has a billboard surface that points at other people while someone is using it.

Apple already built for this: Kid Cue plays Peanuts cartoons on the outer screen so a toddler looks at the camera, Duo Preview shows your subject their own frame while you shoot, and Duo FaceTime lets whoever is standing next to you join the call from the outside screen.

Technically speaking, the developer hook is the scene accessory API from the multiple displays tech talk: your main UI runs inside, and you pair whatever you want on the outside. AKA you can leverage multiple displays and scenes.

We used to have more of this in the world. Paperbacks were free advertising for a century on every train and every beach. The Kindle killed that. We had the glowing Apple logo on Mac lids until Apple dropped it in 2015 to make the 12-inch MacBook thinner. That surface is back and now you can remotely control it.

So, what’s your cover? e.g.

That last idea makes me wonder…no, certain actually. I’m sure you’re aware of this trend around “new surfaces” people are selling ads on. Like that woman who launched BrandMyLaptop.com to sell sticker space on the back of laptops or the guy selling sticker space on his body for a race.

Someone is definitely going to build a marketplace to ride this trend on the Duo outer screen, now just with better reporting!

I just bought the domain brandmyscreen.com if anyone is interested, and here’s a POC I spun up…feel free to steal it 😂

The screenshot test for this move is different because the cover gets snapped by strangers out and about. Someone seeing a guy’s Duolingo score on a train is funny and people will post that on TikTok. It’s not the play that is screenshotted by your user.

From unfolding, folding, to all the different poses and hinge controls…I thought I’d spare you the write up in this email in case you didn’t care to go over them right now.

If you want to know what each new pose/gesture is, what it does and what it supposedly feels like, I put a Notion together for you here — it includes ideas for each

TLDR—there are ways to build your app’s version of iBeer or Pixel Pals or whatever other weird and wonderful idea you can come up with inside each gesture.

iBeer was a magician’s joke that made $20K a day because it was first to make a new sensor feel like something.

Your phone is about to bend. What are you going to make it do? 🎨

› The design rules: Apple’s own guidance on poses, the hinge, and what moves where. → Design for iPhone Duo (12 min)

› The weird API: hinge angle as an input, the whammy bar, and the teleprompter on the outer screen. → Leverage multiple displays and scenes on iPhone Duo (7 min)

› The layout rules: reserved regions, arrangement views, and how content moves around the fold. → Strike a pose with adaptive layouts on iPhone Duo (17 min)

› The science of sharing: the paper on why awe travels and sadness doesn’t. → What Makes Online Content Viral? (20 min)

› The precedent: the iOS 14 widget rush in numbers. → Sensor Tower on the home screen app spike (4 min)

🔨 A tool → The Three.js iPhone Duo someone built over the weekend. Drag to fold it, upload your own screenshot, and see what your app looks like mid-unfold. It’s the best free Duo mockup tool I’ve found so far.

📺 A video → Andrew Garfield explains why he deleted his ChatGPT after making a movie on OpenAI

📬 A read → The inside story of iBeer, including why Steve Sheraton left it all behind to go live on a farm in Spain.