Samsung’s Galaxy Ecosystem Is Becoming More Like Apple’s - but With Gemini at the Centre
Newsweek · C · trust 42/100
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. For years, the knock on Samsung was that it made brilliant hardware and then surrounded it with a fragmented software experience that never quite cohered. What came out of Galaxy Unpacked 2026 in London today suggests that era is ending - not because Samsung suddenly built its own AI stack, but because it stopped pretending it needed to.
The event, Samsung's first major UK announcement in 14 years, introduced three foldables, two watches, a credit card, a financial services platform with stablecoin support, and Gemini-powered smart glasses made with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker. That last category is the tell. Samsung isn't launching products anymore. It's building an ecosystem, and Google is providing the connective tissue.
Apple's playbook has always been the same: own the hardware, own the software, own the experience, and charge accordingly. Samsung has historically competed on hardware specs and price breadth. But the Unpacked lineup - phones, watches, rings, earwear, financial services - now maps almost point-for-point onto Apple's own device family, right down to a tiered product structure with a new "Ultra" foldable at the top at $2,099, a standard Z Fold 8 at $1,899, and a Z Flip 8 at $1,199. The Galaxy Ring is even on track to become the first FDA-cleared over-the-counter ring device for sleep apnea risk detection, arriving this fall.
The key difference is who builds the intelligence layer. Apple's "Apple Intelligence" platform is vertically integrated, privacy-first, and deliberately walled off. Samsung's approach sets it apart structurally - the company is carving out a role as the premium hardware and user experience tier built atop Google's underlying AI infrastructure. Samsung gets cutting-edge capabilities without funding the research. Google gets Samsung's user base. Samsung has set a target of reaching 800 million Galaxy AI-enabled devices by the close of 2026. Rather than a milestone measuring physical units shipped, the figure reflects how broadly Google's Gemini platform is being deployed across Samsung's device ecosystem under the Galaxy AI label.
TM Roh, Samsung's president and head of device experience, said the following at Unpacked: "AI is becoming infrastructure, the invisible backbone of our daily lives." The devices, in that framing, are just the surface. He went further: "Now the question is: if AI is becoming more personal, more proactive and more multi-dimensional, what is the optimal device to bring that experience to life? We believe the answer is foldables." That's a pointed argument, given that Apple has no foldable on the market yet, though one is widely expected. Samsung's new shorter, wider Z Fold 8 - designed to feel less intimidating for first-time foldable buyers - reportedly beat Apple's rumoured wider iPhone form factor to market.
The software tells the bigger story, even if the smart glasses represent the clearest window into Samsung's cross-device ambitions. One UI 9, built on Android 17, brings what Samsung describes as agentic AI capability to the foldables - Gemini can interpret what's on screen, work through multi-step tasks across apps, and run those actions in the background while the user does something else. Roh put it plainly at Unpacked: "Gemini's advanced reasoning capabilities allow it to read what's on your screen, interpret detailed prompts, and carry out sequences of actions spanning multiple apps."
On Galaxy Watch 9, Gemini activates with a wrist raise - no spoken trigger required. The smart glasses, launching this fall, route calls, audio, and photos directly into the Galaxy phone ecosystem, with Watch gestures acting as a remote control. Every purchase of a Z Fold 8 Ultra, Fold 8, or Flip 8 comes with a six-month Google AI Pro trial, per Google's own announcement at Unpacked. Bixby isn't gone, and Perplexity is available as a third option, but the flagship AI experience is Gemini - and Samsung is making no effort to obscure that.
Quick Share now works across Android and iOS, Smart Switch transfers passwords and messages via QR code, and the Samsung Galaxy Card - launching in the US through Barclays and Visa - sits inside Samsung Wallet, which is expanding to support stablecoins.
Roh's closing line at Unpacked was: "This is how your Galaxy experience expands. Bringing your devices together." That could have been said on stage at an Apple keynote in 2018. The difference is that Apple built that integration internally over two decades. Samsung is assembling it in real time, through partnerships, and with a more open architecture underneath (and with a better AI). Whether that proves more resilient or more fragile than Apple's model is the interesting question. For now, Samsung is the only company shipping a full device ecosystem with a foldable at its centre - and it's moving considerably faster than its most obvious rival.
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