2026-09-12 05:00:00
David Smith shared some numbers on how many people are using WidgetSmith, his insanely popular, and therefore pretty representative of the overall market, app. He found the iPhone 17 line in general grew quicker than previous lines, but…
With the exception of the Air really struggling to find market share. For comparison the 16 Plus ended its first year at around 1.4% (vs the Air's 0.3%).
This is particularly interesting to me because I recently pulled some metrics on what iPhones my users were using, and this is what I got:
And here's a breakdown of just the iPhone 17 generation:
This works out to about 6% of my iPhone users using the iPhone Air, or about 20x more proportionally than David's more mainstream app. Honestly, the numbers are pretty striking here, with David showing a pretty even split between the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and 17 Pro Max, slightly decreasing in that order. Meanwhile, almost half of my users are on the Pro Max, another quarter are on the Pro, and the 17 is neck and neck with the Air. Clearly, my customers lean more enthusiast and are higher end buyers on average.
Although I will say one thing that caught my eye with my bar chart is that across every generation, the vast majority of my customers have Pro devices, except for the iPhone 12 and 13 generations. I don't have a pretty visualization for this, but those are actually primarily iPhone mini holdouts who are sticking with those tiny phones. Shout out. 🫡
We're a little over a month away from the iPhone Duo coming out, and it will surely get quite a bit of attention when it does, but I expect there will be a similarly vast difference between David and my charts a year from now. I suspect he will have a sliver of his users on the Duo, maybe more than the Air, but probably not that much more. And I would not be surprised if 15 to 20% of my users actually adopt it by this time next year.
2026-09-11 21:49:08
I'm always looking for little ways to make Quick Reads better. Sometimes that means big feature updates. Other times it means subtle quality of life improvements. Today I released one of those small quality of life improvements.
A lot of users will keep Quick Reads open in a browser tab all day long. Maybe it's a pinned tab or whatever, but they save things that they want to read later and expect those to show up in the queue when they go back to it. However, that didn't always happen because while the queue did auto refresh, it didn't do it as frequently as was needed. Also, if you navigated to a different page, it would actually stop refreshing (a bug I hadn't noticed until today).
When I was building Nonogame, I knew that I wanted to pause the game when the user navigated away from the tab or went to a different window. Thankfully, the web supports this, so I was able to detect when the window was no longer in the foreground and pause the game automatically. As you may expect, the web also has ways for you to detect when the window comes back to the forefront, and I'm using that in Quick Reads to automatically check for new things in the queue when you navigate back to the tab.
Here's a demo of it in action a few minutes ago in production. I'm saving things from Birchfeed and a random website with the browser extension, and both of them show up effectively instantly in the UI when I go back to the Quick Reads tab. I hope you like it!
Not the main point of this post, but I've mentioned 3 of my products in here…that's synergy, Lemon.
2026-09-11 04:18:00
Today I do the impossible and get through my biggest thoughts about Apple's announcements from yesterday in less than 10 minutes. Here's what I found most interesting about the new iPhone Duo, iPhone 18 Pro, Apple Watches, and AirPods 5.
2026-09-10 04:00:00
I have a lot more to go through in collecting my thoughts on Apple's new products announced today, but I wanted to dedicate one quick post to the fact that I think the new iPhone Duo is Apple leaning in to what makes them special and what makes people like me really love so much of what they do.
I've been using Samsung's latest folding phone that has a very similar form factor to what Apple just announced, and it's gotten me accustomed to what the folding phone experience is. I personally very much like it, and it's the most joy an Android phone has brought me in close to a decade. That said, I just watched Apple's iPhone Duo unveiling, and it immediately made my Samsung phone feel behind the curve.
Technically, the iPhone Duo looks very good, but candidly, I don't think it looks meaningfully more impressive than the hardware in the Galaxy Fold8. It's Apple's software where I feel a large gap has been created.
One of the key things I have complained about with the short and squat outer display on the Fold Eight is that software feels kind of cramped on it. Most apps have headers and footers that take up vertical screen real estate that I don't have to spare on a display like this.
Apple has addressed this inherent compromise by reshuffling the entire iOS app layout to move controls to the side of the screen to not only be more reachable, which by the way is a bit of a challenge on a wide screen like this, but also to give you maximum vertical real estate for whatever it is you're looking at. I don't go "holy shit" that often when watching Apple events at this age, but they got one out of me this time.
There's other stuff, like the seemingly incredibly elegant animation as you finish unfolding the display, where the left half of the screen looks like it's out of focus until you get it all the way open. It looks cool and it looks like it will feel very natural. When I open up my Fold8, it's fine, but the inner screen just pops from off to on at a certain point when I'm doing the opening process. It's an extra flourish that's not necessary by any means, and I can understand why someone would wonder why I think this is any better than what Samsung is doing, but it's the sort of extra flourish that elevates the experience. Now that I've seen it, it makes what I was used to feel old.
Apple's not the first company to make a folding smartphone. In fact, they're one of the last to the game. But what I saw today is exactly the sort of thing I want to feel when Apple enters a new category. Yes, the hardware looks excellent, but the software is where it looks like they're truly differentiating, and I am excited to try it out next month.
2026-09-09 08:38:32
It's not particularly useful for me, but I really dig this little UI library.
2026-09-09 07:36:10
The iPhone Air is a really interesting device, isn't it? It's the first time I can think of where you paid more to get less in an iPhone. The iPhone Air costs a not-insignificant $200 (or 25%) more than the iPhone 17, and in order to achieve its incredibly thin design, it sacrifices two main features: battery life and cameras. Notably, these are the two features that consumers consistently name as the top things they look for when upgrading their phone (well, besides keeping the same OS they're used to). We always want more battery life, and we always want better photos.
This isn't any new insight after a year of seeing sales info, and I predicted that this would be a tough trade-off for a lot of people to make immediately after seeing the Air revealed last September. I expected it to be the worst-selling of the four iPhones that came out at the end of the year. All the indications we have from outside Apple are that this has indeed come to pass, but I don't think that means the iPhone Air is a failure.
I think the iPhone Air is taking the role that the MacBook Air took many years ago. When the MacBook Air debuted, it came out in a MacBook lineup that had the normal MacBook and the MacBook Pro. The Air was worse than the MacBook in almost every way, and yes, it cost more to boot.
For a time, Apple had the MacBook, the MacBook Air, and the MacBook Pro. But after a few years, the technology got to a point where Apple could fit a very good consumer laptop into the MacBook Air wedge, and they discontinued the MacBook. The laptop line became the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, and that's the lineup we've had for an incredibly long time, up until and including today.
I don't think it's unreasonable to expect this same future for the iPhone lineup. In fact, at the start of 2025, I predicted that the thin iPhone we knew was likely coming out at the end of the year was actually not another phone in the lineup, it was just the new iPhone 17. Obviously, I got that prediction wrong, but I think it's one of those predictions that you get wrong on timing, not on the final state.
There's a new rumor out today that suggests that the iPhone 18 will not actually come out, and the iPhone Air 2 will be the non-Pro iPhone on offer. I don't know how credible that rumor is, but it's literally what I predicted a year and a half ago, and I do think that is still where we're going.
I think the iPhone Air, as it exists today, is too big of a compromise to be the "standard" iPhone Apple, but I don't think it's that far off. Give it an ultrawide camera and improve the battery life a bit, and I think you have a very competent and cool mainstream iPhone. The rumors are that the iPhone Air 2 will get a second camera, and it will almost certainly have some level of improved battery life, so I guess I wouldn't totally dismiss that idea from happening in early 2027. The safe money is probably on 2028, but who knows? Frankly, I wouldn't be enormously surprised if they did it this spring.
We're already pretty confident that the only phones we'll see tomorrow are the Pros and the Ultra/Fold/Folio, with the normal iPhone 18 coming in the spring. As I wrote in my predictions post for the folding iPhone, I think this staggered release schedule is going to push more people to buy the Pro phone this year because they'll be used to upgrading in the fall, and there won't be a non-Pro upgrade option for them. They'll say, screw it, and level up.
That makes the iPhone 18 in the spring a pretty lackluster release. Yes, I know not everybody follows the Apple news like we do, but society in general has a feeling for when new iPhones come out, and it's the fall. That's when the excitement is, and you don't get that sort of excitement for the more budget phones coming out in the spring, so I do think it will be a more tepid release.
I feel like making that release the next iPhone Air, and having that just be the new normal iPhone, would be okay. It just feels like this is a year of change with the iPhone, in terms of what phones are in the lineup, when they come out, and how much they cost. Maybe that's just one of the new changes as well. Rip the band aid off.
I'm writing this post the day before the September iPhone event, although I didn't really need to hit that deadline since we're probably not going to know the validity of these predictions for many months still. But hey, what's the point in having a blog if you don't make some predictions that will surely end up being wrong down the road?