What Phones Wave Users Carry: iPhone Duo, iPhone Air and the Pro Habit

Every time Apple ships a new iPhone, we get curious about the same thing: who's actually buying it? Not the whole market, just the people who use Wave AI to record their meetings, lectures and conversations. They're a specific crowd, and the phones they choose say a lot about them.

This fall gave us two good questions to answer. iPhone Air has been out for a year now. And iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable, arrived in late October. So we looked at which phones people use with Wave. Here's what we found.

iPhone Duo is off to a fast start

iPhone Duo first showed up in our data on October 22. Three weeks later, about 1 in 115 iPhone users on Wave is on a Duo.

That may not sound like much, but compare it with the last new design:

• Over 3.5x iPhone Air. At the same point after launch, Duo had more than three and a half times as many Wave users as iPhone Air did.
• A bit more than half an iPhone 18 Pro. The new Pro models still move faster. That's no surprise: Pro is what Wave users buy (more on that below).
• It's upgraders. About 85% of the people using Wave on a Duo were already Wave users before they got it. They bought the new phone and brought Wave with them.

Duo owners are also our most intense users. Among Duo owners who recorded something in the last month, the typical person made more recordings than owners of any other iPhone, about 25% more than iPhone 17 Pro owners. They're heavy multi-device users too: more than twice as large a share of their recordings come from the Wave desktop app.

Our guess is that an early-adopter foldable buyer is exactly the kind of person who lives in their notes. A phone that opens into a small tablet is great for reading a transcript next to its summary.

That's why we built for it from day one. On Duo, Wave for iPhone uses both halves of the screen: your library in a sidebar next to the session you're reading, Ask Wave with its history in a side pane, calendar details on the right-hand page, and a two-page recorder with a notepad beside it. Fold it halfway on a table and Wave switches to a tabletop recording layout, so the phone stands up in the middle of the conversation.

iPhone Air found its people, but not many of them

iPhone Air has settled at about 1% of iPhone users on Wave, and that number has barely moved since the summer.

But the people who do carry an Air are interesting. About 60% of them were new to Wave when they showed up on an Air, compared with about 20% for the new Pro models. They record about as often as Pro owners and subscribe at the highest rate of any iPhone in our data. There aren't many of them, but they're committed.

iPhone 17e tells a similar story. Two thirds of its Wave users were new to Wave. Cheaper and thinner phones bring in new people. A new Pro mostly brings back people who already use Wave.

Wave users buy Pro

The five most common iPhones among Wave users are all Pro models.

The 17 Pro Max alone is about 1 in 8 iPhones on Wave. The newest Pros are catching up fast. Two months after launch, the iPhone 18 Pro and 18 Pro Max together make up almost 6% of iPhones on Wave.

People who record their work days tend to want the biggest screen, the best microphones and the longest battery. Many of them pay for their own phone, so the Pro Max makes sense.

Meanwhile, on Android

Android has had foldables for years, and Wave users have been there too.

• Samsung runs Wave's Android world. About two thirds of Wave users on Android carry a Samsung, and the most common Android phones on Wave are Galaxy S Ultras: the S25 Ultra, S26 Ultra and S24 Ultra. It's the same Pro habit as on iPhone.
• The Galaxy Z Fold keeps growing. About 5.4% of Android users on Wave carry a Z Fold, up from about 4% a year ago. October was the Fold's best month in our data. Add the Z Flip, Pixel Fold and Motorola Razr, and about 1 in 13 Android users on Wave carries a foldable.

That's where iPhone Duo is headed, if it follows the same path. A year from now, we'd bet foldables are a bigger slice of our iPhone users than iPhone Air is today.

How we counted

We counted people who used Wave for iPhone or Wave for Android, by the phone they used it on. A person who switched phones counts for both. We report shares, not totals, and the numbers run through mid-November 2026. We only look at device type and app activity. Nothing here comes from the content of anyone's recordings.

If you're on a Duo, a Fold or an Air, we'd love to hear how you use Wave on it. Reply to any Wave email and tell us.