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Believe it or not, it didn’t all start with Samsung. Royole, a now-bankrupt manufacturer of flexible displays, was the first to release a commercial folding phone, the “charmingly awful” FlexPai. Samsung’s first Galaxy Fold followed a year later, plagued by a variety of faults that saw review units break within days. That launch went so badly that it prompted Chinese rival Huawei to delay the launch of its own Mate X foldable by five months; its unusual design with the foldable screen wrapped around the outside of the phone proved unpopular regardless. Motorola was next to join with its first Razr foldable, closely followed by Samsung’s similar Z Flip; we scored each 4/10 and 6/10 respectively.
To say it was a rough first two years for foldable phones would be an understatement, but things did get better. Samsung’s subsequent generations of foldables didn’t break half as easily as the first wave, and it learned the valuable lesson that integral parts of the display stack shouldn’t be as easy to remove as a screen protector.
More manufacturers joined the market, with foldables launched by Google, OnePlus, Oppo, Vivo, Xiaomi, Honor, and more. Prices slowly came down too — while flagship book-style foldables have hovered more or less around the $2,000 mark for seven years straight, cheaper models have appeared too. Motorola’s entry-level Razr is now $799, and last year Samsung introduced a cheaper FE variant of its Z Flip 7, for $899.
The hardware evolved over that period too. Foldables got thinner, lighter, and more durable; the creases got flatter and less visible, while some displays began to include stylus support too; the cameras started to catch up to standard slab phones. Perhaps most importantly, the form factors began to shift too.
Until recently, foldable phones settled into two broad categories: compact flip phones, by now with square cover screens that extend across the outside of the phone’s front; and larger book-style foldables that are thin when shut and almost square when open.
This has slowly begun to change. Huawei was the first to push new designs, starting with its Mate XT trifold, then followed by a wider Pura X flip phone, and this year the Pura X Max, wider still. Samsung launched its own Galaxy Z TriFold late last year, and last month shifted its Galaxy Z Fold 8 to the same squat shape as the Pura X Max.
Durability has improved to the point where Google’s Pixel 10 Pro Fold was able to introduce an IP68 rating; Honor’s Magic V6 has since one-upped that with IP69. That phone is also the thinnest foldable on the market, and the one with the largest battery, two feats that have been made possible by silicon-carbon battery designs, a more energy-dense technology that enables smaller batteries with larger capacities. The latest foldables are barely thicker than flagship slab phones when closed, and almost as thin as the USB-C port when open, while packing batteries that last a day or two per charge.
Oppo’s Find N6 is almost as thin and long-lived as the Honor phone, but has another trick up its sleeve: an almost invisible crease. It’s still possible to see and feel the point where the inner screen folds, but only if you really hunt for it, and even then it can often be difficult to find depending on the light.
As for cameras, this remains the one area where foldables still have work to do, but not too much. Recent foldables from Oppo and Vivo have had triple rear cameras capable of impressive quality, comparable to some slab flagships. But they still lag behind the top tier of Ultra handsets, while costing substantially more. Still, this may be one area where foldables never fully catch up — cost and design constraints likely mean that the best of the best cameras will be limited to regular phones for the foreseeable future, with foldables always a step or two behind.
Despite all these improvements, foldable phones remain an undeniably niche proposition: according to Counterpoint, they made up just 1.6 percent of the smartphone market in 2025.
The tech behind foldable phones is now mature enough for even Apple to trust it: The first foldable iPhone is widely expected to debut next month alongside the iPhone 18 Pro models. The looming launch will be “a turning point for the foldable segment,” according to IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo, in a report predicting Apple will claim 34 percent of the foldable market by value in its first year.
What remains to be seen is whether Apple will have the influence to grow the foldable market, drawing in customers who were skeptical until now, or simply waiting for a foldable that runs iOS. This could be the tipping point that pulls foldables from a niche to the mainstream, though assuming Apple prices the phone at a premium, there will still be pretty strict limits to its reach.
Even before its first sale, the foldable iPhone has already had an impact. Remember Huawei and Samsung’s wider folds? It’s probably no surprise that they appeared just months before Apple’s foldable, which leaks suggest will be similarly wide. More companies are likely to jump on the bandwagon, with leaks pointing to wider folds from both Oppo and Honor on the way. The next 12 months will be the test of whether this form factor is truly more popular with users, or if Android manufacturers will regret hopping on the Apple bandwagon.
It’s less clear if more manufacturers will be making trifolds, or even whether Huawei and Samsung will stick with that form factor. Huawei has made bullish claims about the sales success of its two Mate XT phones, so there’s hope it will stick with the design. Samsung, on the other hand, pulled its TriFold from the market after less than three months, though it’s unclear if that was down to low sales or simply a small manufacturing run. Rollables and other experimental form factors will likely have to wait a few more years before being commercialized.
This is a moment of major change for foldable phones. The standard models have gotten so good that they’ve become a bit boring. Outside of new form factors, the annual releases have settled into a rhythm of minor iteration, and price is now the only real reason for consumers to resist them. Foldables are undeniably good enough now, and Apple’s arrival will either open the market up more widely, or prove once and for all that most phone buyers simply don’t care about phones that fold — or at least not at the prices being charged.
- If you’re skeptical that rollable phones are on the way any time soon, remember that it’s been a full year since Lenovo started selling a laptop with a rollable display.
- In the early days of foldables the flip form factor was far more popular, but Counterpoint data shows that’s flipped, and it only expects the trend to continue.
- When I say the Oppo Find N6’s crease is hard to see, I meant it — I could barely even capture it in photos. It relies on 3D printing a photosensitive liquid polymer that fills every gap in the hinge, then is hardened with a blast of UV light.
- There’s a lot we don’t know about Apple’s first foldable, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports it will run a version of iOS adapted to deliver an iPad-esque interface, though without the full multitasking features of iPadOS. Oppo’s ColorOS remains the gold standard for foldable software on the Android side, combining flexible split-screen options with floating app windows.
- My colleague Allison Johnson became a devotee of working from working from a foldable — or, as she puts it, Purse Computer — and laid out her journey finding a suitable setup
- Foldable displays have improved a lot over the last few years, but the basic principles of current designs were set when Samsung introduced a flexible glass screen on the first Galaxy Z Flip. Sean Hollister wrote a great explainer at the time of how exactly Samsung and other manufacturers make glass bend.
