Samsung Is at Its Best When It Innovates, Not When It Follows Apple

Let's get one thing straight before we get into this. Samsung is not a copycat brand. This is a company that put big screens on phones and got laughed at for it. It brought the stylus back into fashion with the Note series and made foldable phones from concept videos into a real product category. Samsung has genuinely shaped what the modern smartphone looks like, and that is exactly why what has been happening lately is so frustrating to watch.

Because for a smartphone giant like Samsung, it sure does spend a lot of time looking over Apple's shoulder. 

Things Are Getting Very Obvious, Samsung 

Let's start with the most recent one. It is almost confirmed that Apple is working on a foldable phone, and we have everything to know about the iPhone Fold. It will be a wide-screen foldable, unlike Samsung's narrow Galaxy Z Fold 7. So, soon after the leaked CAD renders of the folding iPhone hit the web, we started seeing reports of Samsung also working on a Galaxy Z Fold 8 Wide edition.

We can chalk it up to a coincidence, but then there was last year when rumours of a super-slim iPhone Air started circling. Samsung rushed out the Galaxy S25 Edge, a slim phone that very few people had actually asked for. The gamble did not pay off for either company, but the timing was hard to ignore.

Then there is the material switch. Samsung moved the Galaxy S24 Ultra from aluminium to titanium, a change that would have seemed reasonable on its own. Except Apple had done the same thing with the iPhone 15 Pro the year before. Fine, it is a coincidence again.

But then Samsung switched back to aluminium for the Galaxy S26 Ultra, just as Apple made the same call for the iPhone 17 Pro. At some point, coincidence stops being a useful word.

Samsung Has Been Here Before 

The issue in hand goes as far back as the original Samsung Galaxy, which looked a little too familiar with Steve Jobs’ big reveal of the decade, the iPhone. The Cupertino giant was well within its rights to ask Samsung to politely get rid of the similar home button look on their phone with a lawsuit.

Samsung also spent years mocking Apple for removing the headphone jack. There were the infamous "Dongle" ad, social media posts, and the whole show. Then Samsung quietly removed it from the Galaxy S20 series with the same reasoning like that of Apple. The rest of the Android industry followed. Samsung also removed all the advertising against Apple, knowing that they would also face backlash for it. 

To be fair, Samsung is far from alone in this. Vivo, Infinix, Oppo and plenty of others have made careers out of borrowing Apple's design language. Xiaomi even copied Apple's naming scheme for its latest Xiaomi 17 Pro Max. 

But Samsung is different. It has the resources, the engineering talent, and the legacy to do things on its own terms. I mean, Apple wouldn't even try a foldable if Samsung hadn't perfected it. But this is also what makes the pattern so noticeable.

Samsung at Its Best When it Stays True to Itself 

Here is the thing: when Samsung bets on its own ideas, the results speak for themselves. The Galaxy Z Fold 7 became the slimmest phone in the world, not the S25 Edge. The Note series built one of the most loyal fanbases in tech history despite all the issues with the Galaxy Note 7.

Apple is reportedly working on a quad-curved iPhone next year, but guess what? Samsung did it 12 years ago in 2015 with the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 Edge. 

The S26 Ultra's privacy screen is the latest example. It is the kind of feature that only Samsung would ship, and it is exactly the sort of original thinking that sets the brand apart when it chooses to lean into it.

That is what I want more of. Bold, divisive, distinctly Samsung decisions that might not please everyone but could not have come from any other company. Samsung doesn't need to follow anyone's roadmap. Let Apple do the catching up for a change.