Is Apple About to Launch a Folding iPhone? What This Means for Apps
Apple will soon hold its annual iPhone event under the tagline “Surprise and Shine”. Alongside the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, the industry consensus is that Apple will finally unveil its first folding iPhone.
Folding phones are nothing new, with Samsung already seven generations deep. What is new is Apple entering the category, and when Apple enters a category, it stops being a niche hardware story and starts being a strategy conversation. Expect the question to land in your next roadmap session or QBR: “Do we need to do something about folding?”
For most organisations, the honest answer is “not yet, but here’s what to watch.” For a specific subset, the answer is “yes, and there’s a first-mover window.”
What we’re expecting from the announcement
Nothing is confirmed until Apple says it, but the supply-chain reporting has converged tightly over the past six months:
Two things stand out. First, this will be a low-volume but high-profile product in year one. Second, and more importantly for anyone shipping an iOS app, users will effectively be switching between an iPhone and a small iPad every time they fold and unfold the device.
The signal we’ve already seen in App Store review
Rumours are one thing, but behaviour changes at Apple’s review gate are another.
Over recent weeks we’ve seen noticeably increased scrutiny of iPad behaviour in apps that are configured as iPhone-only.
We’re not alone. Apple’s own developer forums carry multiple threads from developers whose iPhone-only builds were rejected over iPad behaviour, with reviewers testing on iPad hardware regardless of the declared device family.
Read that alongside a device whose inner screen is iPad-sized and the inference is straightforward: Apple is quietly raising the floor on how gracefully apps handle a larger, unexpected window. Our practical advice to every team we work with is the same; run an iPad smoke test on every App Store release from now on, whether or not you claim iPad support. It’s cheap insurance against a rejection that costs you a release window.
Folding is old news everywhere except iOS
Here’s the part worth being clear-eyed about: the design and engineering problems are largely solved. Android has had adaptive tooling for years with window size classes that let a layout reconfigure the moment a device unfolds, and APIs that expose hinge position so content isn’t sliced in half by a fold.
Apple will almost certainly ensure the majority of existing iOS apps run acceptably out of the box, as Android did. “Acceptable” is the operative word. On Android, the apps that stand out on foldables are the ones that treated the extra space as a design opportunity rather than a scaling problem, and that took deliberate effort.
Not every app needs a folding strategy
The market maths matters here. Global foldable shipments reached around 20.6 million units in 2025, a rounding error against total smartphone volumes. Counterpoint Research forecasts roughly 21% growth in 2026, with Apple taking about 25% share in its debut year behind Samsung’s 32%.
So a folding iPhone will be a genuinely small population of a genuinely wealthy audience. If your app is a utility used in short bursts, a loyalty card, a booking confirmation, a meter reading, a two-tap check-in, a folding-specific experience is not a good use of your budget. The priority will be to make sure it doesn’t look broken when unfolded, or impede overall experience.
Where it does warrant attention
There are a number of reasons why this change might impact your brand, and where you may need to take action.
Google’s own developer guidance claims foldable users spend roughly 14 times more than standard phone users. Treat vendor figures with appropriate caution, but the direction is intuitive: people who buy a £2,000 phone are not a low-value cohort.
Building for the fold, not just the screen
A folding iPhone would give product, design and engineering teams more space to work with, but simply stretching today’s app experience across a bigger screen would miss the opportunity.
Apadmi’s product, design and engineering experts give their view on what the fold could mean for apps, what teams should be thinking about now, and where the biggest opportunities could lie.
Product
“We all know foldable phones aren’t new. The technology already exists, so we know the experience works. The bigger question is whether we can make it valuable.
We shouldn’t be asking, ‘How do we use the extra screen?’ We should be asking, ‘What problem disappears when someone unfolds the device?’
If unfolding simply reveals more of the same experience, it’s just another feature. If it helps customers make better decisions, compare information more naturally, or complete tasks in ways they couldn’t before, that’s where we will create real value together.”
– Rebecca Stephenson, Director of Product, Apadmi
Design
“A first question is how we should treat the fold itself. Do we design around it like a bezel, or let it become structural: a natural divider for comparing, sorting, or handing off between two things at once? The good news is, we already have some insights from Samsung and Honor owners so we can build on what we already know.
Opening the device is also a behavioural and context shift, not just a physical one. One-handed becomes two-handed, and suddenly the user is not quite as mobile as they were. That may help guide which tasks users unfold for, and which remain on the outer screen.“
Landscape can’t be treated as a ‘nice to have’ anymore. Most iOS apps are portrait only but a book hinge phone makes landscape a primary canvas; navigation, reachability, and layout patterns will need to be carefully considered. Multi-column and split view have already been solved on iPadOS but it’s going to be interesting to see if the fact that this is a phone (and by nature, more portable) introduces new patterns rather than just borrowing from what already exists.
Ultimately we’ll need to do research into what ‘unfolding’ means to a user in the moment: is it starting something new, or continuing something they were already doing? Apple is going to need app designers to be engaged and actively explore the possibilities a more popular folding phone brings. Otherwise that second, bigger screen becomes a novelty rather than a reason to buy.”
– Matt Harney, Creative Director, Apadmi
Engineering
“The initial effort will be to verify behaviour and de-risk. Size classes, Auto Layout and SwiftUI’s adaptive containers along with Atomic Design Systems have been a long established practice allowing layouts to reflow on their own.
On top of that, an app that handles accessibility well, especially Dynamic Type, is proof it can cope with variable spacing. Cross-platform stacks will need to catch up, both to whatever APIs Apple expose and the long tail of third-party libraries that need to update – a maintenance overhead, but one that should be familiar to a mature mobile-specialist team.”
– Tom Thackstone, Technical Director, Apadmi
Is there a first-mover advantage?
Probably, and it’s narrow. Apple champions apps that showcase new hardware; App Store editorial placement and event stage time have historically followed the apps that adapted early. With initial supply constrained, the pool of optimised competitors will be small, but for the right brand, a well-executed folding experience buys disproportionate visibility for a modest investment.
For everyone else, the win is more of a practical one: use the announcement as the prompt to fix the adaptive-layout debt you’ve been carrying since the first iPad.
Stay tuned for more details from Apple, and what steps to take in the coming months to prepare for the new hardware.
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