I’ve spent the last few months testing some of the best foldable phones ever made. From Motorola’s impressive first stab at a notebook-style design in the Razr Fold to the thin and light construction of the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra and the Pixel 11 Pro Fold’s focus on content creation, they prove just how much innovation and competition exist in the space.
Yet, despite all their efforts, I always run into the same frustrating wall with these Android-powered devices. I genuinely believe that Apple’s long-rumored iPhone Ultra has a golden opportunity to instantly sweep the competition — and it won’t need to rely on a triple-lens camera setup or an entirely creaseless display to do it.
The killer feature that could crown Apple the undisputed leader of the segment is the exact software hurdle Google and Android manufacturers still haven't cleared: seamless app scaling and truly dynamic layouts. Here’s the proof.
Age of Origins — stretched out look
To be fair, most core native apps are well-optimized for both the inner and outer displays of the foldable phones I’ve tested. Apps like Gmail, Google Calendar, and YouTube dynamically adapt their layouts and scale seamlessly between screens.
However, third-party games tell a completely different story. In Age of Origins, you can see how poorly the interface scales when transitioning between the displays. The result is an aggressively distorted, stretched-out layout that makes playing nearly impossible — and the only way to fix it is by force-closing and restarting the game entirely.
TikTok — black bars and a crop
TikTok is one of the most popular apps around, but my patience is always tested whenever I run it on a foldable. As shown above, the app loads nicely when launched on the outer screen, maintaining the familiar vertical layout of any standard slate phone. But when I unfold the device to view it on the main display, it aggressively adds the video with thick black bars on the left and right — wasting a massive amount of prime screen real estate.
If I take the opposite approach and launch TikTok directly on the main display, the app forces a zoom-crop to fill the entire square aspect ratio. While that eliminates the dead space, it severely cuts off the top and bottom of the video, often hiding essential visual details and on-screen text. Either way, you are left with a compromised experience.
Castlevania Symphony of the Night — even more retro
Lately, I’ve been enjoying some retro gaming thanks to a new MagSafe gaming pad I’ve been using — and the current title I’m pursuing is Castlevania Symphony of the Night.
When I unfold the phone, the game doesn't dynamically expand or scale its rendered canvas to take advantage of the extra real estate. Instead, I get massive black bars flanking the gameplay window, with touch controls floating awkwardly across the letterboxed borders.
Even worse, switching between the outer and inner displays can trigger an aggressive shrink-to-fit behavior, leaving the active game screen stranded in the center surrounded by dead black space on all four sides. For an experience meant to feel expansive, poor aspect ratio scaling makes it feel more cramped than playing on a standard phone.
Apple’s chance to shine
This is where Apple can completely alter the foldable landscape. While Android makers have spent years refining hardware hinges and striving for ultra-thin designs, they’ve consistently struggled to get third-party developers to treat foldable aspect ratios as a priority. Apple, by contrast, enforces stringent guidelines that guarantee unified, responsive app layouts across its entire ecosystem.
By ensuring proper app scaling and dynamic layouts in iOS 27, the iPhone Ultra has the potential to deliver a foldable experience that simply works right out of the box.
Instead of letterboxed retro games, squashed interfaces, or awkwardly cropped video feeds, Apple can offer seamless layout transformations between phone and tablet states. By solving the software continuity and dynamic scaling issues that have eluded Google and its hardware partners for years, Apple wouldn’t just be releasing another foldable — it would establish the gold standard.
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