iPhone Duo is the first iPhone with two front cameras. Both are square sensors with an ultra-wide field of view: one on the outer display, and one beneath the inner display — the first under-display camera on iPhone.

That creates a problem no previous iPhone had. "Front" no longer means "pointing at the user."

Everything downstream follows from this choice.

Discover a front camera the ordinary way — an requesting position with a Wide or Ultra Wide device type — and on iPhone Duo you resolve to a new virtual front camera. It switches between the two physical cameras by itself: inner camera when open, outer camera when closed.

It always uses the most relevant camera, and you write no switching code.

The cost is that it exposes only what both physical cameras can do:

If the app needs 4K, high frame rates, or any depth-based feature, this is not enough.

Address each physically, via the built-in outer ultra-wide and built-in inner ultra-wide device types:

Full capabilities, but now you must switch cameras when the user opens or closes the device. Which brings us to the hard part.

has always had a fixed — on iPhone, or . Both of iPhone Duo's front cameras report . That property describes where a camera sits on the hardware, and on a device whose displays can face opposite directions it no longer tells you where the camera points relative to the person looking at your UI.

Three situations make this concrete:

(in AVKit) answers the real question: which cameras are forward-facing right now, relative to a given view. Build one from three things — your app's , the device types to monitor, and a change handler — and it keeps you current as the device moves.

Because it is anchored to a view, it reports facing relative to the display that view is on. When the view is on the outer display, the outer front cameras are forward-facing and the rear cameras are backward-facing. Open the device, the view moves to the inner display, your handler fires, and now the inner front camera is forward-facing while the outer front and rear cameras are backward-facing.

Driving both displays at once? Create one coordinator per view. Each reports relative to its own display, so the same rear camera is forward-facing to the outer view's coordinator and backward-facing to the inner view's. That is correct, not contradictory — it is the whole point. (Dual-display camera UI comes from the scene accessories API; see .)

The coordinator is tied to a view, so it is isolated to the main actor. Your change handler must not call AVFoundation APIs directly.

Instead of an , it hands you an

AVCaptureDeviceDescriptor

— a sendable, main-actor-safe stand-in carrying everything needed to construct the real device. Pass the descriptor to your camera actor and build the there. This is the intended path; don't try to smuggle a device across the boundary.

Streaming the rear camera's full field of view on the inner display leaves extra room around the preview. Two reasonable choices: offset the preview and group controls in the space left over, or let the preview fill the display. Control this with on .

Streaming an ultra-wide front camera, exploit the square sensor — set on the to pick a landscape aspect ratio that fills the inner display.

Rotation. Adopt so previews and captures stay upright. On iPhone Duo it updates when the app moves between displays, which is what keeps rotation consistent across both. Once you have adopted it, turn off camera-sensor-orientation compensation — it is enabled on all of iPhone Duo's front cameras and is redundant work once the rotation coordinator is doing the job.

Note that direction and rotation are separate coordinators solving separate problems. Which camera to stream is direction; which way its output is oriented is rotation. Most camera apps on this device want both.

Apple's related articles: Choosing a Camera by the Direction it Faces and Supporting Device Rotation in Your Camera App. For the square sensor generally, see Support the Center Stage front camera in your iOS app from WWDC26.