Duo-Man turns your 2026 iPhone Duo into a 1980s Sony Walkman

Long before the iPod, the Sony Walkman was the device of choice for those who wanted to add a soundtrack to their life. Now a Duo-Man app recreates the experience for those of us old enough to have owned one, and you’ll be able to use it with Apple Music … more…. Duo-Man turns your 2026 iPhone Duo into a 1980s Sony Walkman.

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An indie developer has built an app that turns Apple’s upcoming iPhone Duo into a virtual Sony Walkman by using the foldable’s hinge to mimic the classic cassette player’s flip-open door. Creator Vidit Bhargava is calling the app Duo-Man, which was designed in BitRig’s new iPhone Duo development environment.

I’ve had my iPhone 15 Pro Max for three years and have completed 1,000 battery charge cycles. Here’s what the experience has been like.

Bhargava’s app lets users open the device to pick their music and "insert" a cassette on the 7.6-inch inner display, then snap it shut to start playback, 80s-style. Bhargava told he wanted to make the experience feel authentic, so he went so far as to record button clicks and static from a real Walkman for use in the app.

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Duo-Man won second place at the recent Bitrig hackathon in San Francisco, and his post about the app on X (Twitter) has gained more than 2.1 million views. Duo-Man offers the complete walkman experience on the iPhone Duo.

Apple clarified that this was by design as a way to intentionally manage performance on devices with degraded batteries to keep them from unexpectedly shutting down. Lots of understandable criticism followed, which led to Apple introducing the Battery Health metric and a toggle to override the performance management feature.

Open the Duo to pick and ‘insert’ the cassette, Close the Duo to start listening. Yes, I actually recorded the button clicks and static noise from a real Walkman!

Then the iPhone 15 series was the first to display the battery’s cycle count in addition to its health. A device completes one charge cycle when it uses 100 percent of its battery capacity, though this doesn’t need to be all from one charge.

It was fun making this at @bitrig hacks today. Pic.twitter.com/juSrLhofrH — Vidit Bhargava (@viditb) September 27, 2026 The enthusiastic response has led Bhargava to turn the project into a proper release, and the finished app will support Apple Music and local files, as well as an Apple Pencil feature for "rolling" the cassette loop (a common battery-saving Walkman hack).

For instance, if your phone goes from 100 to 50 percent, then you charge it back up to 100 percent, a full cycle is completed when the level hits 50 percent again. The higher your cycle count, the more your iPhone’s battery will have chemically aged.

Depending on its popularity, Spotify support may also be on the cards. No release date has been announced for the app, but we know when the iPhone Duo is coming: Pre-orders begin Friday, October 16, with availability starting October 23.

Apple says the iPhone 14 series and older models are designed to retain 80 percent of their original battery capacity at 500 charge cycles.