Apple’s iPhone 17 has come and gone and while we certainly love the iPhone 17 Pro and its vibrant cosmic orange color, I can’t help but be disappointed that the long-rumored foldable iPhone Flip wasn’t part of the company’s September launch event. Most Android phone makers, including Samsung, Google, Motorola, OnePlus, Xiaomi, and Honor, have had their own foldable phone lines for several generations, and it’s starting to feel like Apple is late to the party. This could pose a problem.
Apple dominates in the premium phone category, but foldables – which fall into the premium category in terms of price – are already hot on its heels, with Motorola telling CNET that 20% of customers buying its foldable Razr have left Apple. Meanwhile, Samsung is on the seventh generation of its Flip and Fold series. As Lisa Eadicicco discovered during a visit to Seoul, “foldable devices are everywhere” in South Korea, Samsung’s home country.
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With almost every major Android phone maker entering the foldable device market, Apple risks losing potential customers. It also risks letting a rival like Samsung become the go-to name in foldable devices, which could make it harder for Apple to make an impact if it eventually launches its own device. Additionally, early adopters attracted to foldable technology may be too entrenched in the Android ecosystem by the time Apple’s phone arrives to want to move to iOS.
Apple is unlikely to be worried. Around 20 million foldable devices from all manufacturers are estimated to have been sold globally in 2023, while Apple reportedly sold 26.5 million iPhone 14 Pro Max handsets in the first half of this year alone. In 2024, foldable sales were flat – and 2025 isn’t looking much better, according to analysts at CounterPoint Research, although Samsung reported a record number of pre-orders for its latest foldable. Clearly, Apple believes it hasn’t missed the boat yet.
The iPhone 15 Pro Max is a superb phone. What if he could bend?
Apple has a history of biding its time, observing the industry, and releasing its own version of a product when it’s ready. Apple didn’t invent phones, tablets, smartwatches or computers, but it found a way to take existing products and make them more useful, more valuable in everyday life and – dare I say – more exciting. This is why the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac lines dominate the market today.
For me, I need to see Apple’s vision for the foldable phone. I’ve written before about how disappointed I am with foldables. I’ve been a mobile journalist for over 14 years, and phones have become increasingly boring as they’ve converged into slight variations on the same rectangular slab.
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Foldables promised something new, something innovative, something that briefly sparked some enthusiasm in me, but several years later that enthusiasm dimmed to the point of extinction. These are good products and while I like the novelty of a screen that folds, they’re not a revolution in the way we interact with our phones. Not in the same way that the arrival of the touch screen happened back when we still pressed buttons to type texts.
I was hoping that Google’s Pixel Fold would be the phone that propelled the foldable forward, and while the recent Pixel 10 Pro Fold – the second generation of Google’s foldable – offers some great updates, it still doesn’t offer any sort of revolution. Instead, it seems more like a “me too” move on Google’s part. Ditto for the OnePlus Open. So I must instead look to Apple, a company with a proven track record of product revolutions, to create a new vision of the genre that truly advances the way we use our phones.
Google’s Pixel Fold is a decent phone, but it doesn’t significantly advance the category.
This innovation will not only come from product design. Apple works closely with its third-party software developers, and it’s this input that would allow a foldable iPhone to become truly useful. My biggest gripe with foldable devices right now is that while the hardware is decent, the devices essentially run stock versions of Android with a handful of UI tweaks. These are ordinary phones that bend by accident.
Few Android developers are embracing the foldable format, and it’s not hard to see why; there are not yet enough users to justify the time and expense of adapting their software to a variety of screen sizes. The multiple folding formats already available mean that Android foldables face the same fragmentation problem that has plagued the platform since the beginning. Android-based foldables are simply a more difficult platform for developers to create than regular phones. Apple would be able to change this, as it did with the iPhone and iPad.
Apple did not invent electronic tablets, but its iPad range revolutionized the category.
Given Apple’s close relationships with top developers – not to mention its own vast team of developers – I expect an eventual Apple foldable to offer innovations that make it more than just an iPhone that folds in half.
And I sincerely hope that will be the case. I want to look forward to technology launches again. I want to be excited about having a new gadget in my hands and feel that “wow” moment when I do something transformative for the first time.
In short, I don’t want to be bored with technology anymore. Apple, it’s up to you.
I took over 600 photos with the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max. Look at my favorites
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