Next year, Apple will enter the foldable phone market, and after more than seven years of mainstream folding devices, its debut won’t be light on competition. As noted by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple is no stranger to tough competitors, but its folding phone launch is shaping up to be a little different.
“When the company introduces its first foldable iPhone at the end of next year, it will be entering a product category that’s already seven years old—pioneered and dominated by its biggest hardware rival, Samsung Electronics Co. And this time, Apple won’t be debuting a radically new interface or transformative hardware,” writes Gurman.
In short? Apple may be behind—again—and this time it’s not in a less-important category of phone-centric AI features. If Gurman’s reporting is correct, when Apple’s folding iPhone launches, it won’t debut with groundbreaking hardware like Samsung’s Z Fold 7—an almost impossibly thin and light folding device that moves the whole category forward. Instead of thin and light, however, Apple will reportedly focus on trying to pare down the notable crease in folding devices caused by the necessity for a hinge. And don’t get me wrong, minimizing the crease is a worthy quest, but I’m also skeptical that eliminating it (or making it imperceptible) can even be achieved.
At the end of the day, a folding phone crease may just be physics. Not only does folding things (including a bending display) just create a natural crease over time, but there’s always the hinge problem. Stuffing a hinge under a screen creates a bump, and while that bump has flattened over generations of folding phones, I’m skeptical that it will ever be completely flat. So, if eliminating the hinge is a long shot, what perk does that leave Apple’s folding device with? iOS, of course.
Sure, Apple’s folding iPhone won’t be the first folding phone out there—far from it—but it will be the first folding phone with iOS. Maybe that will mean something, and maybe it won’t, but software has been the name of the game for Apple in terms of phones for a while now. A part of that is Apple purposely walling off its Messages app to competitors with the infamous green bubble, but the other part is that those who’ve used iOS for most of their smartphone-having lives still genuinely prefer the experience. With a new form factor in folding phones, Apple has a chance to prove that its reputation for building user-friendly smartphone UI still means something.
What its twist will be is anyone’s guess (maybe a better multitasking experience? a novel FaceTime feature?), but it’s clear that Apple is also looking to iOS for differentiating its folding iPhone. “And as part of the development of iOS 27 — which formally kicks off soon — Apple will prioritize software features tailored specifically to this new form factor,” writes Gurman in his latest newsletter. I’m skeptical that Apple can actually enter into the folding phone market and go from zero to kicking Samsung’s ass, but if it’s going to do that, it’s clear that software is its best bet. And with iOS and the Messages app on its side, Apple might just scrape by with titans like the Galaxy Z Fold 7 already wowing Android and iOS users alike.