My main frustration with the Pixel Fold so far has everything to do with the web

As a guy who has been waiting a very long time for the Pixel Fold, you can absolutely trust that I want to see everything about this phone with rose-colored glasses. I want it to be better at tasks than other phones. I want it to be more fun to use and I want it to be so good that going back to a boring old slab phone feels, well: boring.

And in a handful of scenarios, I get that exact sensation. Using messaging apps like Gmail or WhatsApp in a two-pane setup feels amazing and apps like Google Keep are genuinely a better experience than what I’d get on any standard smartphone. But for every one of those types of experiences, I have at least 20 not-so-great interactions with web-based content, and that is where things get pretty crappy, pretty quickly.

The mobile web isn’t built for this just yet

As a former (current, too, I suppose) front-end web developer, I’ve built my fair share of websites. And in those hundreds of builds, I thought long and hard about every element included in the site and how they would all work together well on smaller screens.

The general workflow basically went like this: get the desktop looking sweet with an eye on what each element will do when downsized, make sure the phone version is tight and thought out, and then do some basic cleanup for every size in-between.

The majority of flexible website tweaking over the years has been focused primarily on two main sizes: desktop and mobile. After all, the number of people viewing any given site on a tablet-sized screen pales in comparison to the amount doing the same via a proper laptop/desktop and/or a phone. So, basically, as long as the tablet views weren’t broken and the landscape orientation for larger tablets displayed the desktop layout, things were quite good.

But now we have what I’d consider an in-between size that needs attention. At least, it eventually will. Foldables clearly represent a fraction of a percentage of web browsing traffic, but as they grow in popularity, web developers will need to take note of what is going on. Because right now, it isn’t pretty.

The vast majority of websites (ours included until I pushed the updates today that you may or may not be seeing just yet) simply don’t have rules in place for the screens these folding phones possess. Inside the Pixel Fold, for example, you have a screen that’s not quite big enough to be a large tablet and not small enough to format things on the page in an aesthetically pleasing way like a standard smartphone would. Take a look at an example of this below, showing a full-width site and then the same site put back into a more-standard smartphone-sized container via the Pixel Fold’s split-screen:

First off, I’m not taking any shots at Tom’s Guide; I could have used any number of large or small sites that simply aren’t set up to take advantage or look good on a screen that’s too big to be a phone and too small to be a tablet. For most of them, the padding to the left and right of the content is purposefully minimal to make things more readable on a slender, narrow smartphone screen. And when you take that same approach and sprawl content across a wider display, things just look weird.

Again, none of this is anyone’s fault, but reading content on the web with this phone’s larger screen feels similar to reading a magazine where there are no columns and sentences run from one edge of the page to the opposite edge of the adjacent page. No one wants that and it makes sense when you think about newspapers and magazines presenting themselves in columns for all these years. For whatever reason, it’s just easier to read and consume that way.

And for someone like myself that spends a lot of time with my mobile device reading articles and consuming content, I’m a bit bummed by this right now. Being perfectly blunt, I don’t like reading articles on the Pixel Fold at the moment. And while I do think developers of mobile apps will slowly but surely fix up their phone-only apps to make sense on tablets and folding phones, I’m just not sure how many web developers are overly concerned with building great UI for this size screen.

And that makes me sad because there’s not much Google or any other phone maker can do to fix this issue. Over time, I suppose the web will adapt if enough people have larger screens in their pockets. The mobile web took years to come around, but eventually everyone got on board. If enough foldables are out in the wild, web developers won’t be able to ignore the form factor.

But until that is the case, it sure makes using one of these phones feel a bit like a chore. While you’d think the expansive mobile screen would simply make everything a bit better, in this case it simply doesn’t and I almost want to just use the smaller, outer screen for reading content. That sounds nuts, right?

My main frustration comes from not being sure what to do about it right now. I suppose if I do end up finding enough charm in all the other things the Pixel Fold excels at, I’ll find peace with all the awkward web content. But I’ll be honest, it’s gonna take a lot of charm to make up for this poor part of the experience for the forseeable future. In time, I do think it can change. I just don’t know that I’m prepared to wait around until it does.