Chan Karunamuni on the Duo’s Open/Close Translucent Transition

Chan Karunamuni, human interface designer at Apple, on X:

iPhone Duo is here! Excited to have worked on the design of our open/close transition. It’s designed to make the two displays feel like one seamless experience by perceptually bending the focal plane, not the content, so that it feels like opening a window onto a singular view.

Karunamuni thanks a few engineers by name, which is always good (and for Apple employees, far too rare) to see.

Johnnie Manzari, HI designer formerly of Apple, now at Google DeepMind, retweeting Karunamuni:

The second I saw that transition I thought “here’s the next ‘change the whole industry’ design from Chan”.

Previous such raise-the-bar designs that Karunamuni led or played a major hand in include the Dynamic Island in 2022, the “shockwave moment” when you put two iPhones together to initiate AirDrop or NameDrop in 2023, and iOS 18’s cool-ass Flashlight beam UI in 2024. He also gave Steve Lemay this full-throated public endorsement upon his promotion to lead all of Apple HI design upon Alan Dye’s departure for Meta last December.

★ Saturday, 24 October 2026