I’m not looking forward to the Samsung Galaxy Tri-Fold — and because of this very big problem

While not confirmed just yet, the Samsung Galaxy Tri-Fold appears to be real, and close to actually landing in stores. (At least in certain countries.) It's going to be exciting to see a double-hinged foldable phone finally hit the market (the Huawei Mate XT notwithstanding), but I don't need rumors to tell me that it will not be smooth sailing for anyone using this groundbreaking smartphone.

Even today, six years after the first foldable phones hit the market, apps are not designed with them in mind. It makes sense; app developers only have so much time to refine their products, so why spend time adapting an app for a kind of phone only a small percentage of users have? And why spend the time developing apps to work especially with tri-fold users, who are destined to be a subset of that already small subset?

I expect some of Samsung's own apps, like Settings or Notes, will be given a makeover to help them play nicely with the TriFold, whether it's open, closed or somewhere in between. But Samsung, while a major player in the smartphone world, can't force other app makers to do the same.

As things stand, some third-party apps have been adapted for wide foldable phone screens, while a few are able to scale intelligently enough to work. But many still work their best on a rectangular screen rather than the near-square display inside most foldable phones. The worst example of this is video streaming apps and games, which appear bordered by huge black bars or are uncomfortably zoomed in, with content missing from the sides.

Extrapolating this experience to a triple foldable presents us with a potentially even more horrible user experience. If only the outer screen, the one closest in size to the average smartphone, displays apps in a comfortable way, then all the ingenious engineering in the world won't make it a useful or good product.

Depending on how close to the golden 16:9 ratio the fully unfolded Galaxy Tri-Fold is, perhaps that usage mode will work alright, as well as the fully folded mode. But then that would still leave the part-unfolded phone a weird, unpleasant experience to use, which begs the question of why make it a triple foldable anyway. Why not just make an extra-large, single-hinged foldable phone?

It's this concern that makes me concerned for the Galaxy Tri-Fold, and foldables in general too. As things stand, it looks unlikely that foldable phones are going to reach an equal ratio of users as regular bar-type smartphones. Therefore the incentive to improve things is never going to be strong enough to make things better.

Despite their limitations, I love using foldable phones. The Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Oppo Find N5 are two of my favorite phones of 2025. These are saved from the app compatibility issue via their robust multi-window interface options, so perhaps this is the way out of this app compatibility mire that could work with the Galaxy Tri-Fold too.

But until Samsung sends a senior executive onto the stage at a Galaxy Unpacked event (hopefully one not too far in the future) to show how the Tri-Fold will behave with common third-party apps in full-screen mode, my anxiety is going to continue to simmer.

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