Seven years after the debut of foldable screens, why are users still not ready to unfold and embrace them?

Seven years ago, Samsung released its first foldable smartphone. Over the past seven years, Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo and Honor have successively launched dozens of products in this segment.

Where are the users of these products now?

They are stuck in after-sales disputes over crease-induced liquid leakage, in warranty rejection notices citing "man-made damage", on quotation sheets where screen replacement costs nearly half the price of a new device — or even behind an inner screen that has never been unfolded once.

Last year, foldable phones only accounted for 2% of the global mobile phone market. According to Counterpoint data, foldable users unfold their inner screens 3.1 times per day on average, 76% of consumers have never used the hover function. Considering that the statistics only cover users who have tried the hover feature, the actual full utilization rate of hover is far lower, and the full utilization rate of inner screens may be less than 30%. The group that really makes full use of this category is most likely far less than 0.6% of the entire mobile phone market.

This is still a category with extremely low maturity, extremely low utilization rate and extremely high complaint rate.

Then Apple arrived. Luo Yonghao claimed that the iPhone Duo is "all copied".

There is no valid counterargument to this statement on the factual level. For the foldable form factor, Samsung mass-produced the Galaxy Fold in 2019; for the under-display camera, ZTE launched the world's first model Axon 20 in 2020; for the titanium alloy 3D printed hinge cover, Honor adopted it on the Magic V2 in 2023. Luo listed seven points, each of which has an earlier mass production precedent. If "being the first to make it" is the only measurement, Apple is indeed seven years late. But what is the cost of launching an immature technology category too early? The massive amount of foldable electronic waste over the past seven years is a lesson only consumers who have used these products know all too well.

The problem with Luo Yonghao is that he disguised his judgment on "integration" as a factual statement about "chronological order". The essence of "copying" does not lie in the time sequence, but in judgment — what you copied, what you did not copy, and what you turned the copied things into. He knows best how many elements from Apple he drew on when he made the Smartisan phones back then. Therefore, his sensitivity to "copying" is more about chasing traffic than moral indignation.

For an immature category, profits go to manufacturers while costs fall on users

Luo Yonghao's argument structure goes like this: you did not make it first, so you copied it. This reasoning chain is missing a key link: whether the first movers did it right.

Patent law protects specific technical solutions, not product category forms. In commercial competition, "being the first to make it" and "making it usable" are two completely different things. If "first launch right" equals "innovation right", then after Samsung mass-produced the Galaxy Fold in 2019, all foldable phone manufacturers, including Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo and Honor, should pay royalties to Samsung. Obviously that is not the case at all.

But he only looks at the chronological order, and fails to see what the first movers have done to users.

Foldable phones are packaged into a high-end narrative: new form factor, high price, representing the future. But stripping away this narrative, what users get is an immature high-priced device — creases, liquid leakage, warranty rejection, screen replacement cost close to half the price of a new device, and the after-sales judgment right is entirely in the hands of manufacturers. Users pay the price of a flagship device to test an extremely low-maturity category for manufacturers. What the high-end narrative conceals is that this product should never have been sold to you so early.

The inner screen replacement for Samsung Z Fold8 Ultra costs 639 US dollars, the price of the full screen component with retained part for Huawei Mate XT 2 is 7999 yuan, and the guide price of the inner screen component for vivo X Fold5 is 3690 yuan. These figures are not the "price tag of the screen glass", but the "reset cost of the entire inner screen assembly" — inner screen replacement must include the middle frame, hinge ribbon cable, UTG ultra-thin glass, etc. The hinge is not designed with an independent cleanable structure. Once there is a foreign body sensation or display abnormality at the edge of the inner screen, after-sales service usually directly recommends replacing the entire inner screen assembly. Once a minor problem occurs, the device basically loses maintenance value, but this fragile category is extremely prone to problems in the first place.

On the Black Cat Complaint platform, users of Honor, Motorola, Huawei, Xiaomi and vivo have all encountered similar situations: the inner screen develops cracks, bright lines, liquid leakage or black screen at the crease, and after-sales service almost uniformly determines it as "man-made damage" and refuses to honor the warranty. A Honor Magic V Flip2 user encountered a black screen caused by a crack at the inner screen crease only 7 days after purchase, which was judged as man-made damage by after-sales; a Xiaomi MIX Fold user found small black spots on the inner screen after 18 days of use, and after-sales refused warranty service on the grounds that "there are scratches on the phone surface", nearly 80 users who encountered similar situations formed a group to prepare for collective rights protection. When mediating a foldable phone liquid leakage dispute, the Pudong New Area Consumer Protection Committee clearly pointed out that "the operator's identification of 'man-made damage' and refusal of warranty solely on the grounds of collision traces is not supported by sufficient evidence to completely rule out the possibility of inherent fragility or quality defects of the product itself."

Apple waited so that users do not have to pay for creases, liquid leakage, warranty rejection and expensive screen replacement.

Apple Silicon and UMA are the physical prerequisites for foldable phones to "be usable". Apple Silicon improves performance per watt, UMA allows the CPU and GPU to share high-bandwidth memory, so the battery can be made smaller and thinner, making it possible for foldable phones to get rid of the "brick" form factor. This is not a "One more thing" on the press conference, but the foundation that supports that "One more thing".

Screen material is another overlooked detail. Foldable screens need to be bent, so most of them use a plastic protective layer, which leads to creases and a cheap plastic feel. Apple developed a custom nano-texture display that "is visually flat". Ordinary foldable screens often give a soft, sinking "plastic feel" when pressed. The iPhone Duo achieves a hard, solid touch through a full set of structures from the bottom to the surface: titanium metal base plate and supporting ribs, custom optically clear adhesive, hard polymer covered by UTG ultra-thin glass, with stiffness up to 40% higher than other commonly used materials in the industry, connected by a hinge with more than 100 precision components.

Users will not open the back cover of their phones to check the supporting ribs, nor measure the hinge fit clearance with a vernier caliper. But these details determine whether the device can maintain the same state as when it was first obtained two or three years later. Apple's investment in the "behind-the-scenes philosophy" and some manufacturers' investment in "front-facing parameters" are two completely different product logics.

The same applies to the overall device durability. The foldable structure itself means twice the wear level of traditional devices, and most foldable phones will degrade significantly after being used for a period of time. The iPhone Duo is made of 5-grade titanium, with the back panel and outer screen protected by Ceramic Shield and Ceramic Shield 2 respectively, the latter of which has 3 times higher scratch resistance than the previous generation.

But hardware is only the bottom line. The real deadlock of the foldable screen industry is that users buy foldable phones but rarely unfold them. Counterpoint survey shows that foldable users unfold their inner screens only 3.1 times per day on average, and 76% of consumers have never used the hover function. The number of mainstream applications with deep optimization for foldable screens fluctuates between 300 and 1000, which is negligible compared to the roughly 2.57 million available applications on Google Play. Samsung Z Fold8 has an adaptation rate of 94% for the top 200 applications, but Huang Tao, Vice President of vivo Product, admitted frankly that the "inner screen utilization rate of foldable phones is less than 30%". Adaptation does not mean actual usage.

More critically, many applications cannot even guarantee the most basic stability. Samsung's official support page lists possible errors when the Galaxy Z TriFold is folded: video call interruption, video playback unavailable, navigation interruption, unresponsive lock screen. Huawei's official support page records that when using WeChat mini-programs on the Mate XT, switching from single-screen to three-screen state leads to "interface deformation, truncation, unresponsive button clicks", and the official reply says "some WeChat mini-programs are not yet adapted to foldable phones". Honor community users reported that for the Magic V5, "after opening an app in wide screen mode and folding the phone back, it cannot directly switch to narrow screen mode". When a manufacturer needs to teach users "how to prevent apps from crashing", the software ecosystem of this category is still far from mature.

Apple's solution is not to wait for developers to adapt, but to turn the adaptation work into something developers can do "easily in their spare time": it lowers the threshold with Xcode 27.1, Group Labs, design documents and engineer Q&A, and Netflix, Zoom and Slack have already demonstrated their native experiences under the foldable form factor at launch. iOS 27 is tailor-made for the iPhone Duo, moving the operation area from the bottom to the side, solving the problem that "the interface is stretched wider but the content is harder to read" after the foldable screen is unfolded. This set of software logic originates from iPadOS, but has made clear "subtractions" combined with the mobile phone form factor.

Hardware solves the problem of "whether the screen will break", and software solves the problem of "what you can do after unfolding". These seven years were not wasted. They were spent waiting for the day when users do not have to be test subjects.

"Digital psoriasis": when the industry cannot even hold the bottom line of "copying"

Many manufacturers sell immature products at high prices for their high-end devices, making users pay the price of a flagship device to test the category for them. Low-price devices take another path: they make no profit on hardware, so they attract users with low prices and then harvest profits through advertisements in the system.

At least Apple is "copying" an idea about user experience. The foldable form factor is copied, but the crease handling under the nano-texture glass, the use of the vertical space of the wide screen by the side Dock, and the seamless switching animation logic between inner and outer screens are not "copied", but redeveloped from scratch. But what has the Chinese mobile phone industry been doing over the past decade?

Cramming advertisements into the system frantically.

On August 3, at the Chenkan Scenic Area in Huangshan, Anhui Province, an elderly man raised his phone to shoot the fish lantern parade, but pop-up advertisements flooded in. The page jumped nearly 20 times in half a minute. Every time he closed one, another popped up, the fake "close" button would trigger a new advertisement instead, and the real exit button was hidden in the corner. After a flurry of panicky operations, the fish lantern parade had gone far, and the old man shot nothing. Netizens joked: "After all that operation, the old man almost registered as a delivery rider." On August 5, the topic "iPhones are suitable for elderly people" topped the Weibo hot search list. No matter how conservative Apple is, at least it will not cheat the elderly just to make a living.

Quick App is the most direct entry to understand this structural feature. In March 2018, nine mobile phone manufacturers including Huawei, Xiaomi, OPPO and vivo jointly launched "Quick App", which is deeply integrated into the bottom of the operating system and has the highest system permission. Advertisers can directly call its interface to perform frequent pop-ups that cannot be closed, and secretly bundle downloads. To completely close the Quick App Center service, the path recorded on Huawei's official support page is: AppGallery → Me → Common Services → Quick App Management → Me → About → Stop Quick App Center Service → Stop Service. Seven steps. When IT Times reported in April 2025, this path only had six steps. A year later, it did not get shorter, but added one more step. Huawei officially made it clear that the Quick App Center "does not support uninstallation for the time being". All users can do is disable it, not delete it.

Behind this constant harassment is the profit drive of tens of billions of yuan for manufacturers every year. According to Xiaomi's 2025 advertising revenue of 28.5 billion yuan, 66.2% of which comes from China, and the monthly active users of MIUI in China are about 300 million, the annual average advertising contribution per device is about 63 yuan, and the actual figure for flagship devices may be in the range of 150-300 yuan per year. This is not "earning some extra money casually", but a business that is structurally relied on.

More critically, there is a structural gap in the development of overseas markets. OPPO's overseas revenue proportion has exceeded 60%, vivo's has exceeded 50%, and Honor also broke through 50% for the first time in 2025. But selling hardware overseas does not mean that you can collect advertising revenue. In the second quarter of 2026, Xiaomi shipped 31.2 million units globally, of which about 8.19 million units were shipped domestically. The overseas shipment proportion is about 74%, but Xiaomi's domestic internet revenue accounted for more than 66% in 2025. Hardware going overseas only brings low-margin hard-earned money, while the high-margin revenue from internet advertising still highly depends on domestic users. When advertising revenue becomes such an important pillar in the profit structure, "making the system clean" is a choice that goes against business logic.

A more direct pressure comes from the declining shipment volume year by year. Omdia data shows that global smartphone shipments in the second quarter of 2026 fell by 6% year-on-year. OPPO shipped 28.4 million units, down 17% year-on-year; vivo shipped 21.5 million units, down 18% year-on-year; Xiaomi ranked third with 31.2 million units, but down 26% year-on-year. These three brands are exactly the "worst-hit areas" of system advertisements.

The deeper reason is that the competitiveness structure has gone wrong. The competition of many mobile phone manufacturers over the past decade has focused on "stacking hardware parameters and playing with pixels", but these parameters are all technologies that can be purchased from the supply chain, not their own. Flagship chips rely on Qualcomm and MediaTek, operating systems are built on Android, and high-end screens mainly come from Samsung and BOE. Everyone can stack these parameters, but no one makes money from it. In terms of chips, Apple has the A-series and M-series, Samsung has Exynos, and Huawei had Kirin before it was sanctioned; in terms of systems, Apple has iOS and Huawei has HarmonyOS. These are the things that can support brand premium. Without them, the only things they can do are two: continue to stack hardware parameters, and continue to cram advertisements into the system.

The Honor "Magic Magazine" incident is another sample. On September 10, Zhang from Jinan posted that when his father used an Honor phone to call 120 after his mother had a sudden myocardial infarction, he accidentally entered the "Magic Magazine" page and found it hard to exit, which caused delays. After the incident was clarified, the problem did not disappear. Some media tests found that "Magic Magazine" is enabled by default on new Honor phones, and the exit button in full screen mode is a small icon without text and not in the conventional "x" shape, which requires users to swipe up from the top or bottom to exit. In December 2024, Honor Magic5 Pro and Magic6 users reported that they could not uninstall this function after the system upgrade. The reply from Honor's official community was: "We put advertisements to pay for image copyright and operation costs, and the product design does not provide a separate option to turn off advertisements for the time being."

There is a set of more direct quantitative data on the degree of users' resentment towards advertisements. In its 2026 benchmark report, the third-party quality monitoring platform unitQ analyzed 67.7 million App Store and Google Play user reviews throughout 2025. The core finding is: "Advertising is now the top quality complaint across all vertical segments." In 2025, users recorded more than 1 million advertisement-related complaints, nearly 3 times the figure in 2024. When the priority of "pushing advertisements" is higher than "optimizing user experience", this is not a capability problem, but a choice problem.

Why can't the "Elderly Mode" block pop-up advertisements? In December 2