First look: Per-app zoom controls on Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 8

Samsung’s new foldables are official, and as customers get their pre-orders in for the Galaxy Z Fold 8, Z Fold 8 Ultra, and Z Flip 8, we’ve been on the hunt for new features arriving with One UI 9 stable. Late last week, we uncovered evidence pointing to a new accessibility option for screen zoom, letting you adjust zoom levels for individual apps. At the time, we weren’t sure just how far along progress was — but now we’ve finally found where it’s hiding, and have a chance to show you the feature in action.

Last Friday, we showed you the strings we discovered in a Fold 8 Ultra firmware image for per-app zoom settings. While you can easily make all your apps look bigger by adjusting zoom in display settings, so far Android has lacked the granular ability to have some apps appear more zoomed-in than others.

We weren’t able to show that in action at the time, and now we may know why: Tipster Dylan H shares with us that while this option is currently absent on both the Fold 8 Ultra and Flip 8, it can be found as an in-development feature hidden behind Settings -> Advanced features -> Labs on the Fold 8.

Just like our findings at the time suggested, users have the option to set individual apps to one of five zoom levels. While we see quite a few apps supported here, it seems notable that Samsung apps don’t currently appear to be among them — whether or not that’s something we can expect to change as this leaves Labs for greater availability remains to be seen.

Playing around with the zoom options, it’s clear that some apps are much more impacted than others.

With Chrome, shown above at smallest, medium, and largest zoom levels, page content doesn’t appear to zoom, while your UI does.

Google Maps makes for a much easier to appreciate demo, and the screens above (again: smallest, medium, and largest zoom) illustrate both the UI and app content zooming nicely together, for optimum visibility.

It’s great to already be able to see this option in action, although it has managed to raise quite a few new questions, including why this appears to be a Fold 8 exclusive for the moment — and whether or not that’s something Samsung might change. For now, we might not want to get too far ahead of ourselves, as Samsung has already confirmed that Z8 foldables in the hands of the media aren’t yet on their final retail firmware.

With retail sales formally opening on August 7, hopefully it won’t be long before we start getting a few answers to those lingering uncertainties.