Designing Apps That Work on Foldable Phones

In 2025, we are witnessing smartphones which can transform into a mini tablet or open like a book, where users can perform tasks side-by-side. Users have two screens, where each serves a distinct purpose. It sometimes works as one and also works as two different devices, all depending on how you want to use the foldable phone. 

With the evolution in mobile technology, we are seeing dual-screen devices and folding devices increasingly. With the advent of the technological revolution in smartphone manufacturing, we also need to be prepared for how to transform the design of mobile applications and websites so that they can adjust well to changing screen size dimensions.

Technological Revolution and the Trend of Foldable Devices

The technological revolution and shifts in the market are bringing a rapid transformation of how mobile devices work. With the introduction of dual-screen devices and foldable devices, developers have a new challenge of making their application designs responsive and interactive on dual-screen and foldable devices so that they can deliver a dynamic user experience. 

The introduction of dual-screen and foldable designs has brought new opportunities for users, where they can watch a video on one screen while using a chat application on the other. Your strategies and design ideas for dual screen devices are not only to keep up with the trend, but it is also to be ever ready for the future, technological revolutions and meeting the industry demand.

How to Design for Apps on Foldable Devices? Let’s Find Out

#1: Adopt Responsive and Adaptive Layouts

To create flexible interfaces, developers need to design an application interface which can adjust and switch between the mobile UI and tablet UI. Think of it as having different containers where your application interface will be visible. Users have multiple screen configurations and dimensions in a foldable device, based on which you need an adaptive and responsive app interface design. The responsive design components, like Jetpack Compose and constraint layout, let you adjust to different conditions and screen sizes in an automatic manner.

#2: Multi-Window Mode Optimisation

It is a designer’s job to focus on fixing the width of elements in the mobile application. The available space in the foldable app may decrease at any time, and hence, fixing the width of the elements will become unstable. Hence, it’s important to ensure that the mobile app operates officially in the multi-window mode so that it can run alongside other mobile applications in the foldable device. It is a great multitasking feature that enables users to perform one task on one screen and a different task on a second screen.

#3: Maintain App’s State

One of the most important factors to focus on in the applications running on foldable devices is their continuity. Suppose you are watching a YouTube video on the foldable screen. In that case, if you open it in tablet mode, the video must continue when the user switches the foldable state to a tablet mode for an optimum user experience. To ensure video continuity without disruption. Developers should adopt an API like the builder manager of Android, through which they can maintain the session state of the application gracefully. 

#4: Enhanced Accessibility for Foldable Apps

Since foldable devices are highly flexible, their accessibility should be intuitive and advanced as well. By embedding gesture-based UX accessibility in foldable mobile devices, you can enhance user experience to a great extent. Developers embed gestures like smooth swiping. Drag and drop across screens, join windows and pinch to expand features to improve accessibility. The intuitive gestures in the foldable device improve user experience and satisfy their demands of making the apps highly flexible in foldable designs. 

To Sum Up

There are several tools and frameworks which developers use to design applications for foldable devices. The Flutter framework dynamically allows screen resizing while keeping a single source codebase. Frameworks like react native and Flutter, and APIs from Android JetPack window manager are some efficient options to design mobile applications for foldable devices. React native supports the flexibility of foldable device applications as it offers adaptive layout libraries for multiple folds. Foldable devices need adaptive storytelling where designers should embed their creative thinking and offer increased accessibility to give a true tablet and mobile-like experience in a foldable device. If you are looking for mobile applications for your business, contact our developers at VerveLogic, a leading mobile application development company in India.