Galaxy S8 tipped to sport front camera with autofocus, still a rarity for the industry

I agree...but there's no harm in adding an extra. Maybe a bokeh like effect on a selfie won't look so bad.

You will only get to a couple of meters with a selfie stick. Using your arm, that will be anything between 20 cm to about 90 cm. With current apertures, focal lengths and sensor sizes used, that means a total depth of field (in focus area) of about 20 cm to infinity, if you have autofocus. But since current most front cameras don't they probably pick a fixed focus point at about 30 cm, limiting total depth of field (in focus) to about 20 cm to 80 cm (roughly 60 cm total). Using a selfie stick, will thus often result in a bit more blurry results from that alone, something that will get more and more obvious as resolution (both from sensors and what lenses resolve) increases. If they add autofocus, they can combine several images with focus stacking to either make everything sharp (foreground, subject AND background, regardless of distance) or get much better results with selective focusing, doing the exact opposite. Where out of focus shots are stacked with in focus shots to calculate depth and blur areas in front and behind the subject better and more naturally.

And I forgot to add that some of the most popular selfies, are those with others or subjects in the more distant background (famous people, buildings, etc). This is where focus stacking can gain a lot of detail over a fixed focus lens.

Yeah, autofocus is typically not needed for the front cam. But this news might point to a larger aperture on the S8? Or it's just more marketing to make it seem like a better phone.