Samsung unveiled its foldable phone, the Infinity Flex Display, to developers at an event in San Francisco on Tuesday. We can see from the dynamic picture of the video that Samsung’s foldable mobile phone is designed to fold inside the screen. After the screen is folded, there is another screen outside the phone to display content, but the size is not large.
As you can see from the demo above, Samsung only has to deal with the App switching between the two screens. The idea is that the App that runs on the smaller screen will still be running after it is expanded, and will automatically resize to match the new layout and show more features, not just a larger version.
At this year’s Android Dev Summit, Google announced that it will provide native support for Screen Continuity, a technology it calls Foldables. With this flexible display technology, the App can be adapted to a foldable device.
In fact, Google has long considered that Android will run on devices with different screen sizes, such as Android TV, Android Auto, Android Pad, Wear OS, etc. These different sizes of devices are integral to the Android ecosystem. However, you should note that often we design two completely different UI styles for different devices, and often they are released as separate apps. But the Foldables are a different story, with two variants of the Foldables: a dual-screen device and a single-screen device. When folded, it looks like a phone, and when unfolded, it turns into a tablet. They are twins on a single device, alternating only occasionally in different forms.
Now that Google has said it will support folding screens, it’s worth wondering what form it will eventually take. I guess it will be a responsive framework like Bootstrap in the front end, which may be an additional layout for development, and it will be extended in the form of Support packages.
