Apple just announced iPhone Duo, its first foldable phone, yesterday at its “Suprise and Shine” event. Though the concept of a foldable is new for Apple, it’s entering into a vast, existing landscape of folding phones. So of course someone has already recreated the Duo’s neat opening animation on an Android phone.
While the iPhone Duo doesn’t come out until October 23, one of the more interesting early features shown off has been the Apple A20 Pro’s ability to power both displays at the same time. This allows the Duo to have an opening and closing animation that makes it look, at a certain angle, like the phone’s display is expanding. The effect is unique to Apple’s new phone, but a software developer on Reddit was able to recreate it on a Galaxy Z Fold, though it isn’t exactly system wide.
In the video user moomanjohnny shared to the GalaxyFold subreddit, you can see the Galaxy Z Fold 8’s outer display fade out as the phone opens, only to have the inner display take the image of the home screen and expand it once the phone is fully opened. This was done by taking data from the hinge sensor and then creating a transition animation using a screenshot of the homescreen – not exactly ready for system-wide implementation.
What’s stopping this from being implemented throughout Samsung’s launcher is that the permissions necessary for that only exist in Android’s background processes. Later in the thread, moomanjohnny explains, “SystemUI is privileged by the system in the way that it can layer itself on top of apps, and tell other apps how to render. SystemUI receives a list of surfaces and can composite them on the screen where it wants using SurfaceFlinger.” That because it’s a security risk. “Unfortunately, as far as I’m aware, no vendor has made any of these APIs available to anything other than SystemUI.”
It’s up in the air whether or not this kind of opening animation will ever be supported on the Galaxy Z Fold 8, but it’s clear that the hardware capability is there. With how the Samsung Mobile Twitter page threw a fit about the iPhone Duo during Apple’s event, it’s possible that this functionality will find its way to the Samsung Fold range at some point.
Jacqueline Thomas
Seinor Tech Editor
Jackie Thomas is the Senior Tech Editor at IGN and the PC components queen. She’s been covering gaming hardware for more than a decade for IGN, TechRadar, Gizmodo, PC Gamer and more. You can follow her @Jackiecobra
