- There’s an app in the works for the iPhone Duo that recreates a Walkman
- Called Duo-Man, it makes good use of the iPhone Duo’s two screens to replicate the sense of putting a tape in a Walkman and then playing it
- It currently supports Apple Music and local files
You can’t even buy the iPhone Duo yet, but that hasn’t stopped developers from working on apps for it — and there’s already one app that could, for me, almost justify an iPhone Duo purchase all on its own.
Vidit Bhargava has shared details of their ‘Duo-Man’ app on X, and it’s designed to recreate the experience of an old-school Walkman.
This is something that only works with a foldable form factor, and the dimensions of the iPhone Duo look ideal for it, with the cover screen acting as the front of a Walkman — where you can see a tape spinning away and access controls — and the foldable screen being something that you can open to insert or remove a tape.
A digital take on analog tech
Of course, you’re not actually jamming a tape into the iPhone Duo, but the interface of the app comes close to replicating what a Walkman looks like, and the act of opening and closing the screen to insert a new tape should help recreate some of the tactility of that device too.
The app also includes button click and static sounds recorded from a real Walkman, just to add to the nostalgia value, and you’ll even be able to use an Apple Pencil to wind the tapes.
But this has some modern conveniences too, with support for both Apple Music and local files (with Spotify support possibly being added later), so you’ll have access to a massive library of ‘tapes’ immediately, rather than having to carry around multiple real tapes with you (as we did in the 90s if we didn’t want to hear the same thing on repeat).
The app — like the iPhone Duo itself — isn’t available yet, but it’s seemingly going to be a hit when it does launch, given that the X post about it currently has 2.1 million views and 10,000 likes.
