The last iPhone I bought was the iPhone X, about nine years ago.
Everything Apple released after that felt like an iterative upgrade, so I wandered off to explore the more exotic corners of Android: keyboard phones like the BlackBerry Key2, tiny phones like the Jelly Star, all of them have their merits.
In the end, though, I always landed back on Pixel phones running GrapheneOS, mainly because I want photos that stay sharp even with a bit of hand shake.
But now, finally, Apple is introducing something that genuinely feels different, the same vibe I got when the iPhone X was announced.
Some caveats, though:
- Yes, it's wildly overpriced.
- Android did it first.
- It's a first-generation product, so expect issues.
But the form factor is what wins me over: folded closed, it feels like a small phone again.
Opening and closing a foldable, that's kind of similar like a bird flapping it wings right?
So the idea of playing Flappy Bird by opening and closing the device's hinge was born, say hello to Folding Flappy!
Fortunately Apple is exposing the API that gives you the current hinge percentage, opening it up to all kinds of abuse
onHingeChange API that's available on SwiftUI viewsI used Claude to create a proof of concept, combing Flappy Bird gameplay with the hinge API from Apple and surprisingly it came out as actually playable.
When starting to fold the device, the os immediately starts its fading effect on the left side of the screen, so I had to move all action to the right side of the device. At this moment there's no API I could find that would turn off this behaviour.
Folding Flappy SauceI do wonder if Apple will actually allow the use of the hinge as an input device.
It doesn't seem like Apple published any official rating on the number of times it can be folded, but looking at the Z Fold 8, that one has a rating for 500 000 folds.
Suppose you play Folding Flappy 30 minutes a day, folding 1.5 times each second, then your device would hit that limit rating in about 6 months.
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@rxpz@social.linux.pizzaAbusing the iPhone Duo hinge API to play Flappy Bird was published on 2026-09-29