Apple opened the iphone-duo page on its website and presented a device with this name. On Hacker News, the thread received 1,239 upvotes and 2,173 comments. There are almost twice as many comments as votes. On HN, such a proportion means a dispute: people come to object to each other, and not to upvote.
I am not retelling the characteristics. I have an announcement page and a thread, I don’t have a device and I don’t have a single independent measurement. The name hints at something paired, but what actually stands behind it does not follow from the reason, and I will not speculate. Everything that goes around today under the guise of “it is already known that...” is reading the marketing page out loud.
What is really your task?
Test matrix. New model - a new line in the list of devices on which you promised the customer to work. Deciding whether it is included in the supported ones or not is cheaper now and in writing, and not at the time of the first bug report from the client who bought it.
Layout with nailed dimensions. If the project has media queries for specific iPhone widths and header heights in pixels, the new form factor will find them. It can be checked in half an hour: search by style, see how many places are tied to specific numbers, rewrite the most noticeable ones into relative units and safe zones.
Conversation with the customer. A week after the start of sales, the question “does it work for us?” will come. The answer is prepared in advance and consists of two parts: what have you checked now on the screens available to you and at what point will you check it on a live device. The promise of “everything will be fine” without the second part is what they then pay for on weekends.
Deadlines. As long as the device is not in your simulator or in the test park, the “adapt in a week” estimate is up in the air. First check what is available in your development environment, then give the customer the numbers.
What not to do
Do not rewrite the interface for rumors. The fleet of devices is updated over the years: in the first months, the share of the new model in your analytics will be negligible. Open the report on devices a month after the start of sales - there will be a real answer to the question of whether this work is worth including in a sprint.
Do not participate in the debate “does the market need such a phone?” This debate is going on in 2173 comments and is worth exactly as much as the collective prediction of the market by people who did not hold the device.
My reading: the news will become truly interesting twice. The first time is when the device gets to independent reviewers with measurements, and not with a retelling of the Apple page. The second is when it appears in your own statistics of visits and installations. Between these two points, there is exactly one useful work: remove from the interface the assumption that the screen only comes in familiar proportions. It will pay off whether Duo takes off or not.