The iPhone Duo starts at $1,999, and two friends in Warsaw decided the best thing to do with it is make a grilled cheese. Their game, Toastie, turns the phone into the toaster: you build a sandwich on the open screen, fold the phone shut to toast it, and open it again before it burns. I laughed out loud at a spotlight clip from Brandon Butch, and a few days later one of the developers, Tom Szykulski, emailed us. It's the most iBeer thing I've seen since 2008, and that's a very good sign for the foldable.

What Toastie Actually Is

Toastie is a grilled cheese game played in real time. An order comes in, you get 15 seconds to build it from three breads and 14 ingredients, and then you close the lid and wait. Open too early and the cheese hasn't melted. Wait too long and it burns. The grill screen gives you no countdown, just your sandwich and a Serve button, so you go on instinct. As one of the game's screenshots puts it: "Close the lid. Trust your nose."

Every sandwich comes back with a score card grading recipe, plating, toasting and prep time, and a recipe book tracks your stars across ten sandwiches, from a classic grilled cheese to kimchi and a pesto, tomato and Gruyère. The in game toaster is listed as "Model 2299-D," in "grade 5 titanium" with "one moving part," which is how Toastie earns its subtitle: the world's most expensive toaster.

On a regular iPhone or iPad, you slide the lid shut on screen. On the Duo, you fold the whole phone closed, and that's the version people grab out of your hand.

The iBeer Feeling

If you had an iPhone in 2008, you probably remember iBeer. It was a glass of beer on your screen. Tilt the phone toward your mouth and the beer drained like you were drinking it. Shake it and it foamed up. That was the entire app, and it cost $2.99.

It was made by Steve Sheraton, a magician who had been selling a beer video for the iPhone through iTunes before the App Store even existed. Once the App Store opened in July 2008, his accelerometer version became one of the early hits. Sheraton later estimated it brought in somewhere between $10,000 and $20,000 a day at its peak, and outlets from The New York Times to Time put it on their must have lists. By 2010 it had faded from the charts. As Sheraton told 9to5Mac years later, "A good joke can only be told so many times."

The joke was never really the point. Most people had never held a phone that knew which way it was tilted, and iBeer explained the accelerometer without anyone using the word. Toastie does the same thing for the hinge in about five seconds.

Why the Duo Needs More Apps Like This

Every time Apple adds a new way to interact with the phone, there's a stretch where developers figure out what it's for, and some of the best early answers are toys. The hinge is the Duo's new input, and so far most apps treat it as a screen size change: the display gets wider, a second column appears, and it's the same app with more room. A few go further, which we covered in our list of apps ready for the iPhone Duo, but Toastie is the first I've seen that uses the act of folding as the controller itself.

This might sound like a lot to put on a grilled cheese game, but I think Toastie is proof the Duo can kick off a small app renaissance. A phone that opens and closes, sits half folded on a table and has a screen on both sides gives developers inputs nobody has designed for yet. Think of a board game that hides your hand when you fold the phone, a two player game where each person gets one half of the screen, or a puzzle that only solves when the hinge is at a certain angle. Those are guesses, but Toastie proves the idea works and that people will pay for it.

Two Friends and a Lot of Evenings

The idea came the day Apple showed the iPhone Duo. "My friend Cyprian and I sat down, looked at a phone that opens and closes like a sandwich press, and thought: that's a toaster," Tom told us. He and Cyprian Brytan had a playable version within a week, around mid September, then spent weekends and late evenings after their day jobs getting the details right: the sizzle when you close it, toast that browns properly, and the little review card at the end. Toastie came out on October 10, and the Duo mode was ready on October 23, the day the phone reached customers.

It has taken off fast. Tom told us that since the Duo launched, Toastie has reached number 4 among paid games in the US App Store and the top 10 paid games in 31 countries, and that Apple lists it first in its "Great Games on iPhone Duo" story. iJustine has played it on camera, it has turned up in coverage from WIRED, TechCrunch, MacRumors, TechRadar, The Wall Street Journal's Joanna Stern and MrMobile, and it sits at 4.9 stars on the App Store.

"We're just two friends who like making things on the side," Tom said, "so seeing it at #4 in the US and first in Apple's Duo games story has been surreal."

They're not done, either. The two most requested updates, more levels and a "Freestyle mode," are in the works for iPhone and iPad, according to Toastie's X account. The developers are also pitching it for Apple's new iPad mini, which arrives November 6.

Should You Get It?

If you have an iPhone Duo, yes, and show it to the next person who asks what the fold is for. If you don't, it still works on any iPhone or iPad running iOS 18 or iPadOS 18 or later. Toastie is $2.99 on the App Store, paid once, with no ads, no tracking and no in app purchases.

I hope it's the first of many apps that make the fold feel like a reason to own one.