Apple’s new foldable isn’t even in customers’ hands yet, and Android tinkerers are already playing with its signature trick.
The iPhone Duo’s opening animation — the slick blur-and-expand effect Apple showed off during its launch event — has been recreated on a Galaxy Z Fold 8 by a Reddit user, and the result is eerie in the best possible way. The phone appears to unfold in sync with the animation, as if the software is stretching the home screen across both displays rather than simply switching from one panel to the other.
That visual flourish has become one of the most talked-about details from Apple’s first foldable. It’s not just a fancy transition. The effect helps sell the idea that the phone is one continuous object in motion, with app icons and the interface seeming to stay fixed while the device itself rotates around them. It fits neatly into Apple’s Liquid Glass aesthetic, and it’s exactly the kind of polished bit of UX theater that gets shared everywhere the moment a keynote ends.
On Reddit, the Galaxy Z Fold 8 version was built from the ground up using hinge sensor data to drive the animation. As the phone opens, one display fades while the other expands the captured home screen shot into place. In other words: clever, convincing, and very much not something Samsung has officially baked into its software.
Fun demo, limited reach
The catch is that this is more of a proof of concept than a feature you can casually install. The recreation depends on animation frames and a screenshot-based effect, which means it doesn’t live inside SystemUI the way a true system-level transition would. That matters, because SystemUI has the special privileges needed to coordinate how apps and surfaces render across the device. Ordinary apps don’t get that kind of access for security reasons.
So while the clip looks remarkably close to Apple’s demo, it’s not a turnkey feature for Galaxy owners. At least not yet. Still, the reaction online suggests plenty of people would welcome something similar as an official Samsung feature, especially if it landed in One UI 8.5’s expanding foldable toolkit or a future Good Lock-style customization update.
There’s also a bigger point hiding in the hype. Foldables have spent years competing on hardware — thinner hinges, bigger batteries, cleaner creases — but little touches like this are what make a device feel memorable. Samsung has already shown it can iterate quickly on hardware, and Apple’s entrance into the market may end up pushing both sides to sweat the details even more. We’ve seen similar pressure shape everything from fold design to software polish in stories like Samsung’s wider-foldable strategy and Apple’s own long-rumored push into the category with its foldable iPhone plans.
For now, though, the moment belongs to a Reddit post and a very enthusiastic crowd of foldable fans. Apple unveiled the effect yesterday. Someone else made it run on a Galaxy Z Fold 8 almost immediately. That’s the internet, and also the current state of phone rivalry.
