Apple Really Needs to Launch a Foldable iPhone Flip in September

Apple’s iPhone 17 should be launched in a few weeks during its September event. Improved cameras for IA improvements in iOS 26, the new iPhone range should obtain a multitude of new features. But the long -term foldable iPhone flip should not be part of this year’s launch. Most Android phones manufacturers, including Samsung, Google, Motorola, OnePlus, Xiaomi and Honor, have been selling folding aircraft for years now, and it is starting to feel like Apple is late at the party. It could be a problem.

Apple dominates in the premium telephone category, but the foldables – which are part of the premium space in terms of price – are already believing in its heels, with Motorola saying to CNET that 20% of customers buy its Foldable Saute -Sauté Apple ship. Meanwhile, Samsung is in the seventh generation of its Flip and Pold series. As Lisa Eaddicicco discovered it during a visit to Seoul, “the foldables are everywhere” in the country of origin of Samsung in South Korea.

With almost all the main manufacturers of Android phones entering the foldable market, Apple risks losing potential customers. It also runs the risk of leaving a rival like Samsung to become the essential name of foldables, which could make it more difficult for Apple to have an impact if it ends up launching its own device. In addition, early adopters attracted by foldable technology can be too rooted in the Android ecosystem when Apple’s phone arrives to go to iOS.

Apple is unlikely to worry. It is estimated that around 20 million foldables of all manufacturers were sold worldwide in 2023, while Apple would have sold 26.5 million iPhone 14 Pro Max handsets in the first half of this year only. In 2024, foldable sales were stable – and 2025 was not better, according to the analysts of Counterpoint Research, although Samsung reported a record number of pre -orders for its last foldable. Obviously, Apple believes that he has not yet missed the boat.

Apple has always managed to wait for its time, observe industry and launch its own vision of a product when ready. Apple did not invent phones, tablets, intelligent watches or computers, but it has found ways to take existing products and make them more useful, more precious in daily life and – I dare to say – more exciting. This is why iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Mac lines dominate the market today.

For me, I need to see Apple on the foldable phone. I have already written to what extent I am disappointed with foldable. I have been a mobile journalist for over 14 years and phones have become more and more boring because they have converged to become slight variations on the same rectangular slab.

Find out more: Best Flip phone for 2025

The foldables promised something new, something innovative, something that briefly sparked a certain excitement in me, but several years, this excitement has decreased to the point of being extinguished. These are good products and although I like the novelty of a folding screen, it is not a revolution in the way we interact with our phones. Not in the way the arrival of the touch screen was when we still press the buttons to type texts.

I hoped that the Google Pixel fold would be the phone to catapult the foldable forward, and although the recent Pixel 9 Pro Fold – The second generation of Google foldable – offers excellent updates, it always offers no kind of revolution. Instead, it looks more like a “me too” move from Google. Ditto for the Open Open. So I still have to look at Apple, a business with history for product revolutions, to create a new vision of the genre that really advances the way we use our phones.

This innovation does not only come from product design. Apple works in close collaboration with its third -party software developers, and it is this entry that would help a folding iPhone to become really useful. My biggest complaint concerning foldables at the moment is that, although the equipment is decent, the devices are essentially simply executed standard android versions with a handful of launched user interface settings. These are regular phones that simply folded.

Few Android developers adopt the folding format, and it is not difficult to see why; Users are not there in sufficient numbers to justify time and expenses to adapt their software to a variety of screen sizes. The multiple folding formats already available are available on Android foldables are faced with the same fragmentation problem that has tormented the platform from the start. Foldables based on Android are simply a platform more difficult to build for developers than ordinary phones. Apple could change that, as it has proven with the iPhone and iPad.

Given Apple’s close relationships with high -level developers – not to mention its own developer team – I expect a possible Apple foldable to offer innovations that make it more than a simple iPhone that folds in half.

And I really hope it is. I want to wait for technological launches again. I want to feel excited to have a new gadget in my hands and feel this moment “wow” because I do something transformer for the first time.

In short, I no longer want to be bored by technology. Apple, it’s for you.