If you’ve ever stood in a grocery aisle bouncing between a shopping list in one app and a coupon in another, tapping back and forth like it’s 2014, you know the frustration. Split-screen has been the one glaring hole in the iPhone experience for as long as I can remember, and every year it’s the same shrug from Apple. So when a credible-sounding leak says iOS 27 is about to close that gap, my first reaction is a little hope. After sitting with the reports, my answer splits depending on which iPhone you’re holding.
The Weibo leaker Fixed Focus Digital says Apple is building a system-level way to adapt iPhone apps to wider layouts, along the lines of what HarmonyOS already does. In practice, regular phone apps would reflow to fill a bigger screen on their own, without developers redesigning anything from scratch. The leaker points to iPadOS as Apple’s own proof of concept, since the iPad has handled landscape adaptation at the system level for years unlike the iPhone.
That lines up with what Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported back in March, when he described iOS 27 letting you run two apps side by side, with an iPad-style layout and navigation tucked along the left edge in supported apps. Put the two reports together and you get a consistent picture of where Apple is headed. iOS 27 is expected to debut at WWDC, with a fall rollout alongside the iPhone 18 Pro models and the long-rumored foldable. None of this is official yet, so treat it as a well-sourced rumor rather than a done deal.
Every sign points to the foldable iPhone as the reason for the split-screen functionality. It carries a 7.8-inch inner display, and a screen that large exposes an awkward truth about iOS—almost every iPhone app is designed for a tall, narrow rectangle. Open one of those apps on a wide interior panel and, without a system-level fix, it would sit letterboxed in the middle of all that glass, framed by empty black bars. That looks rough on a device Apple wants to charge a premium for.
So a feature that automatically fans apps out to fill the space, or stacks two of them side by side, isn’t a luxury on a foldable. It’s the groundwork that makes the whole form factor usable. Through that lens, the timing fits. Apple isn’t suddenly rethinking multitasking because power users have been asking for a decade. The company is solving a problem its own upcoming hardware creates. That distinction matters, because it tells you who Apple is building for—and it’s probably not the person holding a standard-size iPhone.
Flip the perspective to my aunt’s iPhone 17 Pro Max. With a canvas that large, two panels have room to breathe. A recipe open next to a timer, a map beside a playlist, a long article next to the notes she’s taking off it—those pairings stop feeling like a compromise and start feeling natural. The bigger the glass, the more the second panel earns its place instead of crowding out the first.
And on a foldable’s 7.8-inch interior, split-screen is the entire pitch. That’s a screen built to show you more than one thing, and a phone that opens to tablet proportions only to run a single stretched-out app would be a waste of the hinge. For that crowd, I think this lands as a meaningful upgrade rather than a checkbox Apple ticks to quiet the critics. If you’re eyeing the foldable or you already carry a Pro Max, this is the kind of feature worth getting a little excited about, because your hardware is the reason it works.
Foldables are still niche, while the iPhone 17 Pro Max was the world’s best-selling handset in Q4 2025. So the foldable might be the obvious showcase, but it’s the Pro Max sitting in millions of pockets that turns split-screen from a hardware demo into something a lot of people will benefit from.
My one worry is that Apple will probably lock this to the foldable, at least at launch. The reporting frames it as a foldable feature first, and the company has never shown much urgency to hand standard iPhones true multitasking. I’d love to be wrong. A version scaled sensibly for the Pro Max would make a lot of people happy, and the iPad precedent shows Apple knows how to do it well when motivated.
But I’m not holding my breath for it to reach a phone my size, and after thinking it through, I’m not sure I’d lean on it even if it did. Split-screen on iOS is overdue, and on the right hardware it could be excellent. If you’ve got a Pro Max or you’re saving up for the foldable, keep an eye on this one. If you’re on something with a more compact display, I wouldn’t reshape your upgrade plans around it. We’ll know far more after WWD.
Related: Apple WWDC26 rumors: AI expansion, Siri redesign, and iOS 27 plans