Samsung's Foldable Empire Is Crumbling as Apple Circles

For five years, Samsung has owned the foldable phone market the way Amazon owns online shopping — not by being beloved, but by being first and being everywhere. The Galaxy Z Fold and Z Flip lines became synonymous with the category itself. Samsung even bragged that it sold more foldables than the next several competitors combined. That era is ending. And the company knows it. The numbers tell a story Samsung would rather you not read too closely. After peaking around 2023, global foldable shipments have gone soft. Analysts at TrendForce and Counterpoint have quietly revised forecasts downward multiple times. In China — the world's most important foldable battleground — Samsung has been crushed into single-digit market share by Huawei, Honor, Vivo, and Xiaomi, all of whom now ship thinner, lighter, cheaper foldables with better hinges and less visible creases. Samsung's response has been price cuts, which is corporate speak for "we're losing." Then there's the Apple problem. Apple has famously sat out the foldable race, letting Samsung, Huawei, and Motorola eat the early-adopter tax. That patience now looks less like timidity and more like strategy. Multiple supply-chain leaks — from Korean media, Taiwanese analysts, and Apple's own patent filings — point to a foldable iPhone arriving around 2026 or 2027. Ming-Chi Kuo and other credible Apple watchers have signaled the company is locking in display suppliers and hinge components. When Apple enters, it won't need to be first. It will need to be good — and it will instantly reset consumer expectations. Here's the uncomfortable truth Samsung's marketing machine avoids: foldables were never a mass-market product. They were a flex for early adopters, a way for Samsung to look like the innovator while Apple looked like the laggard. But flexes don't scale. The crease complaints never fully died. Repairs remain expensive. Durability anxiety keeps mainstream buyers away. And the software story — why do I actually need this thing to fold? — still hasn't been convincingly answered beyond "it's cool." Apple's rumored angle is telling. Rather than a phone that becomes a tablet, leaks suggest a foldable that behaves like a premium phone when closed and something closer to an iPad when open — deeply integrated with iOS and the App Store economy. That's the playbook Apple used to gut the MP3 player market, the smartwatch market, and the wireless earbud market. Let others bleed on R&D. Show up late with a polished ecosystem lock-in. Watch the category consolidate around you. Samsung's real vulnerability isn't hardware. It's that its foldables run Android — a platform it doesn't control — while competing against Chinese rivals who undercut it on price and an American giant that owns the most valuable customers on Earth. Being first got Samsung the crown. Keeping it against Apple's ecosystem gravity is a different fight entirely. Watch the supply chain, not the keynote. When Apple's foldable finally ships, the question won't be whether Samsung loses share. It'll be whether the foldable category survives as anything other than an iPhone accessory market. The smart money says Samsung's five-year head start was never a moat. It was a head start on a race Apple chose not to run — until now.