Hadlee Simons / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Samsung’s been expected to grow its foldables lineup this year with a new, wider edition of the Galaxy Z Fold.
- While evidence has pointed to the existence of this model, we had yet to see any hard visual support for its new form factor.
- This week’s availability of early One UI 9 builds now reveals a pair of Wide Fold animations.
This week has been a whirlwind for Android fans curious about staying on top of the latest system software. First Google hit us with a big Android 17 tease, only to leave Pixel users hanging. And then out of nowhere we got our very first peek at Samsung’s next big update after One UI 8.5, with the first One UI 9 builds showing up. Those have already proved very interesting, offering new evidence of upcoming hardware like Samsung’s “Wide” Galaxy Z Fold. And now we’ve spotted an even more tantalizing look at the upcoming foldable.
We’ve been talking about the idea of Samsung expanding its foldable lineup with a Wide Fold for a while now. Although some sources have cooked up speculative renders to at least give us an idea of the form the device might take, we haven’t had anything approaching an actual real look yet — and certainly not anything official. Until now:
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
Thanks to user wr3ckl3ss on Telegram for helping out with access to the APKs.
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How do we know that this is the Wide Fold we’re looking at? Well, jump back to last year when we were still putting together the early pieces of the Wide Fold mystery, and we were starting to connect the device to the model number SM-F971U. And then we saw that model associated in multiple places with the codename H8.
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
That same codename now appears in the files for these animations. And as you can see, Samsung has prepared both light and dark versions:
AssembleDebug / Android Authority
Admittedly, this isn’t a very thorough look at the device. For instance, we’re not expecting Samsung to pull a Pixel 10a here, and the Wide Fold will presumably maintain a traditional camera island — but there’s not a whiff of it in these animations. Still, we’re very happy with what we are able to see here, and now have a real, Samsung source setting our expectations for the phone’s size and shape.
The phone’s presence in One UI 9 also adds support to the idea that we could expect to see Samsung launch the Wide Fold alongside the Z Fold 8 and Z Flip 8 sometime this summer. That may still feel like a long way off, but with any luck, it might not be that much longer before we start seeing some photos of actual real-life Wide Fold hardware.
In the meantime, we’ll keep crawling over this and future One UI 9 builds in search of further evidence of Samsung’s Wide Fold plans.
⚠️ An APK teardown helps predict features that may arrive on a service in the future based on work-in-progress code. However, it is possible that such predicted features may not make it to a public release.
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