i want to love Galaxy Z Flip 6 from Samsung. I like most of it, but I seem to be screwing it up Flex window experience as much as I praise anything else. For whatever reason, Samsung doesn’t seem interested in making its splash screen experience as fluid or intuitive as it is Motorola Razr Plus (2024). But every time Samsung stalls, there’s a third-party developer ready to step in and push the Galaxy Z Flip series to reach its potential. This time it’s CoverScreen OS, with an obvious upgrade: apps that auto-rotate on the Flex window.

At first, I wasn’t sure why I should care about apps rotating on an almost square display. After all, there’s nothing the Galaxy Z Flip 6 should be able to tell me in landscape orientation that it can’t tell me in portrait, right? Well, that’s mostly true until you open Spotify. You see, if you’ve ever scrolled through a song in the Spotify app, you’ll know that it pops up with more content from the artist you’re listening to, as well as the lyrics of the song playing and upcoming tour stops. It’s all useful information, especially if you want to support a new artist that’s appeared in a playlist, but there’s one problem – nothing works in the Flex window.

It wasn’t until now, at least. With the latest CoverScreen OS update, as soon as you flip the Flip from portrait to landscape orientation, it will switch to the full-screen version of Spotify that allows for portrait scrolling. If you’re like me and constantly check the lyrics to a song to make sure you heard them correctly, the update makes a big difference. Instead of opening my phone, jumping into Spotify and looking up the lyrics, I can do it all from the Flex window and have my phone back in my pocket in about half the time.

Of course, I haven’t found much use for auto-rotating the app in the Flex window outside of music streaming services. It also only works in the app version of Spotify – the widget is still locked to the standard portrait orientation. Other apps I’ve tried, like Strava and Instagram, tend to look and act the same whether in landscape or portrait, and occasionally the rotation causes the bottom edge of the Flex window to act up. However, the rotation option adds something significant to the Galaxy Z Flip series, and I wonder why Samsung didn’t do it first.

I often wonder why Samsung treats the Flex window the way it does. I was willing to give the company the benefit of the doubt when its cover screen was a tiny 1.6-inch panel, but those days are long gone. Samsung has high hopes for its Flex window, going so far as to create an AI-powered Auto Zoom feature for its cameras, but that makes the omissions all the more confusing. Every time Samsung does something clever in trying to do the best flip phone on the market, it seems to do so by ignoring a simple feature that would make the Flex window more useful.

At this point, setting up the ideal Flex Window experience requires a balancing act that I’m not sure how to recommend. If you want apps, there are Okay Lockbut you’re stuck with the standard portrait orientation. If you want rotating apps, there’s CoverScreen OS, but you have to pay a weekly (or yearly) subscription to do anything beyond the basics — which is hard to recommend when the phone already costs $1,100. Maybe you can get by with a carefully curated set of widgets, but Samsung isn’t exactly guiding your hand there either.

Maybe Samsung needs to fully integrate CoverScreen OS into the fold. It must either become part of Good Lock or the default Flex Window experience. Clearly, the most thought went into the smaller parts of the Flex window, and now Samsung should either copy them or give credit where it’s due.