I sat down with Craig Federighi, Apple's Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, to talk about the design thinking behind ...
What Craig Federighi said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Craig Federighi discussed the iPhone Duo foldable, explaining that the translucent opening animation is designed to subconsciously convey continuity between the closed and open states. He detailed the hinge API, accurate to about five degrees, which provides pose data (book, table, tent) for developers, while allowing raw access for custom experiences. On gestures, he defended the left-edge swipe back for spatial consistency, noting that right-edge swipes are reserved for forward navigation in cases like Safari history. He described split view as two independent workspaces that can be pinned together as a fused unit. For app adaptation, he highlighted high-level frameworks like SwiftUI and AI coding tools in Xcode that enable near-automatic resizability, and expressed confidence that Apple's developer community will tailor apps for Duo, contrasting with Android tablets' stretched phone apps.
Key takeaways
Hinge API provides pose data accurate to about five degrees, with smoothed poses for standard app behavior.
iOS 26 allows swipe-back from anywhere on the display when unambiguous, but left-edge remains the always-available gesture.
Right-edge swipe is reserved for forward navigation, preventing loss of forward history in apps like Safari.
Split view on iPhone Duo offers two independent workspaces that can be pinned together as a fused unit.
AI coding tools in Xcode can adapt existing apps to resizability almost automatically, aiding Duo adoption.
Yeah. And my first question is about the iPhone. It is big in the news right now. Yeah, of course. Now I know that when we open and close the foldable phone, we can see the outer screen is sort of like a translucent window that you can see it through right on the inner display. Yeah. So when you design all of this, what are you hoping people to feel or to subconsciously understand when they see the animation?
Yeah, I well I think I think you got at it when you said subconscious because the really the goal there was to make that not some you know fancy animation that you thought about but something that you didn't have to think about that just automatically you'd perceive this effect that the screen became translucent became a window to what was below and you'd actually because fundamental to the idea of the device is this continuity between your experience on the device when it's closed and your experience at what you find when you open it up. And so the idea that as this happens, you're actually looking through the screen above to see what's going to be revealed below just eases that journey in the most natural way. And we're really delighted with how it came out. I think it's subtle but magical.
I also noticed that there's a new API that developers they could access or to read the angle of that hinge. Yes. So, I'm curious how precise or how continuous that data could be.
Yeah. So, it's accurate to about five degrees. Five degrees. Yeah. And we smooth it out. Of course, we think for most developers, we're really focusing on communicating to them the pose of the device. For most developers, they want to understand or our underlying frameworks want to adapt for them to the idea that are you in a book pose? Are you in the on table pose? Are you in a tent pose? And so we make those things. You're not having as a developer to operate on, you know, how many degrees open. We can deliver a really standard consistent experience across apps by communicating the pose and having the frameworks automatically react to that. But there can be creative experiences like the animation that we did but that a developer wants to do in their own app and in that case they can get closer to the raw information.
I think we're fairly confident. Yeah, I think we are confident about durability and I think this is the kind of thing that, you know, we have a long history of exposing to developers all kinds of gyroscope and accelerometer information and developers have made really interesting use for that over time. And so, one of the ways this device expresses itself is through the poses and through the hinge. And we're excited to see what developers do with it.
Federighi, C. (2026, September 23). I Asked Craig Federighi Why iPhone Still Can’t Swipe Back from the Right [Interview transcript]. Donald Decodes. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2933246/
MLA
Craig Federighi. "I Asked Craig Federighi Why iPhone Still Can’t Swipe Back from the Right." Donald Decodes, 23 Sep. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2933246/.
BibTeX
@misc{federighi2026_2933246,
author = {Craig Federighi},
title = {I Asked Craig Federighi Why iPhone Still Can’t Swipe Back from the Right},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Donald Decodes. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {sep},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/2933246/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
