Topic · 5 posts

iPhone

In search of the hypothetical iPhone Duo buyer and other foldable phones

Dois iPhones Duo segurados por mãos, um fechado e outro aberto.

At the end of August, I had the chance to fiddle with a Galaxy Z Fold8, Samsung’s passport-style foldable phone. It’s smaller than I expected. I found it somewhat curious. My time with the device was brief and I think I saw enough. It’s not for me.

This Wednesday (9th), Apple made its debut in the foldable phone segment with the announcement of the iPhone Duo. It looks a lot like the Galaxy Z Fold8. The biggest highlight from first impressions is the animation on the screens when opening and closing them. (It’s cool, indeed.)

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End-to-end encryption for RCS on iOS 26.4

Confirming the rumors, the upcoming iOS 26.4 is expected to bring end-to-end encryption to messages exchanged between iPhone and Android using the RCS standard. There’s more: as this feature depends on a newer version of RCS, 3.0, other welcome additions are also expected to arrive: editing and deleting sent messages, reactions (tapback) without duplicating messages, and replying to specific messages.

iOS 26 still struggles to gain traction with iPhone users 
cultofmac.com

Ed Hardy found some very interesting data in StatCounter's figures:

[…] Roughly four months after launching in mid-September, only about 15% of iPhone users have some version of the new operating system installed. That’s according to data for January 2026 from StatCounter. Instead, most users hold onto previous versions.

For comparison, in January 2025, about 63% of iPhone users had some iOS 18 version installed. So after roughly the same amount of time, the adoption rate of Apple newest OS was about four times higher.

The adoption curve for iOS 26 is atypical, and by a wide margin. Previous years (2023, 2022) delivered numbers more similar to those of 2024, for iOS 18.

I thank all my friends who remain steadfast with iOS 18. I couldn't resist and updated mine, and although I find iOS's Liquid Glass to be the least worst among all the devices I've used so far, it's still the weirdest version since I started using an iPhone over a decade ago.

I hope these numbers set off an alarm in Apple's design department.

Update (5h10 PM): It’s possible, though unconfirmed, that a change in Safari’s user-agent is messing with StatCounter’s numbers. Other sources, however, support the suspicion of slower iOS 26 adoption, albeit to a lesser degree.

The best iPhone

iPhone SE (2022) in black, lying on its back on a white surface, with a little piece of a silver notebook in the background.

The iPhone SE is the most boring phone that ever existed. Almost nobody notices you have a new phone; when someone does, the conversation ends quickly and invariably in a sentence like “it’s just like the old one, only faster”.

I love this.

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