Why won’t Samsung let us see its foldable phone?

Image: justin sullivan / Getty Images

Samsung may have just unveiled the most exciting new phone in years. Or, it may have unveiled a nearly $2,000 disappointment that just so happens to have a flexible display. 

We don’t actually know, because the company barely let us see the phone that’s supposed to herald a new era of smartphone design. Samsung kicked off its Unpacked event by cutting to the chase: it officially revealed the Galaxy Fold, a fold-up phone that doubles as a tablet.

It’s an impressive feat of engineering, to be sure. And the brief demos we caught a glimpse of onstage were certainly more impressive than the clunky and dimly lit demo we saw back in November. Samsung execs showed off the phone’s folding and unfolding abilities, and demonstrated a couple apps: Spotify and Google Maps, as well as three-way multitasking.

But that’s pretty much all we saw. As quickly as it came out, the phone was slipped back into Samsung president DJ Koh’s pocket. 

Yes, we got loads of technical details about the Galaxy Fold’s industrial design — how its hinge functions and the engineering magic that went into the thin, bendy display — but we barely got to actually see it. The phone was only onstage for approximately 3 minutes and 20 seconds by my count. 

Afterwards, the Galaxy Fold, which is launching in two months, was nowhere to be found at the event’s demo areas where Samsung reps proudly showed off the Galaxy S10, Galaxy Buds, and Galaxy Watch Active. Sure, there are plenty of good reasons the company may not have been particularly keen on letting a bunch of overly enthusiastic tech journalists manhandle its new $2,000 foldable phone. 

But its absence — and carefully orchestrated IRL demos — only make me more skeptical that the phone will actually live up to all the hype. When asked why the Galaxy Fold wasn’t made available to journalists at the event, Samsung did not have an official response as of press time.

Let’s talk about the crease. If you watch Samsung’s demos closely, you can clearly make out an unsightly crease that runs right down the center of the display when it’s folded out in “tablet mode.” The crease may be a necessary evil — Royole’s FlexPai has one that made an audible crunching sound — but it’s still ugly.  It also raises questions about the Galaxy Fold’s longterm durability. 

My bigger concern, though, is app support. As I previously wrote about in November, foldable displays will require developers to update their apps to support the new form factor. Google is working to bake this into Android, but it’s not going to happen overnight.

And supporting the Galaxy Fold’s three-way app multitasking will also require developers to opt in (a few notable names already have, according to Samsung).

Leaving aside the question of why any reasonable person would even want to use three apps simultaneously, if history has taught us anything, it’s that this will likely be a giant, buggy mess for early adopters. 

That was true when Google first introduced split-screen multitasking in 2016 with Android Nougat. It took months and months before developers caught up and split-screen multitasking became usable. 

I expect the same will be true for “app continuity” — the idea that apps will be able to seamlessly transition between different-sized displays as quickly as you can fold and unfold it. 

Samsung may have got a few big-name developers to commit, but you’ll likely be disappointed if you’re expecting all your apps to work smoothly on your new foldable phone when it launches on April 26.