Huawei’s Ultra-Thin Foldable Phone Arrives Just as Apple Prepares Its Own — and That’s No Coincidence

Huawei didn’t wait for Apple to set the terms of the foldable conversation. It rewrote them first.

The Chinese tech giant unveiled the Mate XT Ultimate last year — a tri-fold phone that opens into a tablet-sized screen. That device was audacious but bulky, a proof of concept wrapped in luxury pricing. Now Huawei has followed it with something far more threatening to the competition: the Mate X6, a conventionally folding phone so thin and polished that it makes Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 6 look like a relic. And it arrives at precisely the moment when Apple is reportedly months away from launching its first foldable iPhone, a device that’s been the subject of speculation and supply chain leaks for years.

The timing isn’t accidental. It’s strategic.

As Digital Trends reported, Huawei’s latest foldable is “already stealing thunder” from the rumored iPhone Fold before Apple has even confirmed the product exists. The Mate X6, which launched globally earlier this year after an initial China release in late 2024, measures just 9.85mm when folded — thinner than many conventional smartphones. Unfolded, it presents a 7.93-inch OLED display with a 2,440 x 2,240 resolution that covers the full width of the device without the kind of awkward aspect ratio compromises Samsung has tolerated for generations.

That width matters. Samsung’s foldables have long been criticized for their narrow cover screens and tall, slim interior displays that feel more like reading a scroll than using a tablet. Huawei’s approach gives users something closer to a square when open, which better accommodates split-screen multitasking, video, and web browsing. It’s a design philosophy that says the interior screen should feel like a destination, not a compromise.

The exterior screen is no afterthought either. At 6.45 inches, it functions as a fully capable smartphone display on its own, eliminating the frustration Samsung users often describe when trying to use the Galaxy Z Fold’s narrower front panel for anything beyond quick glances at notifications.

Specs alone don’t tell the whole story, but they paint a compelling picture. The Mate X6 runs on Huawei’s Kirin 9100 processor — a chip developed entirely in-house after U.S. sanctions cut the company off from TSMC’s most advanced manufacturing. The camera system, developed with Leica, includes a 50-megapixel main sensor, a 40-megapixel ultrawide, and a 48-megapixel periscope telephoto. Huawei has packed a 5,110mAh battery inside, with support for 66W wired charging and 50W wireless. IPX8 water resistance. And a crease that, by multiple reviewer accounts, is among the least visible on any foldable phone to date.

None of this would matter much if Apple weren’t lurking.

But Apple is. Reports from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman and supply chain analysts including Ming-Chi Kuo have consistently pointed to a foldable iPhone arriving in 2025 or early 2026. The device is expected to feature a clamshell or book-style fold — the exact form factor isn’t confirmed — and Apple has reportedly been working with Samsung Display and LG Display on ultrathin glass and flexible OLED panels for years. A recent wave of patent filings suggests Apple has been focused on minimizing the visible crease, a detail that has dogged every foldable phone maker since Samsung launched the original Galaxy Fold in 2019.

Apple’s challenge is clear. It will enter a market where Huawei, Samsung, Google, and OnePlus have already been iterating for years. The Pixel 9 Pro Fold, Google’s second-generation foldable, addressed many of the complaints about its predecessor. Samsung’s Z Fold 6, while incremental, remains the best-selling book-style foldable globally. And Huawei — despite being effectively locked out of Google services and Western app stores — has built devices that rival or exceed anything available from its competitors on hardware alone.

That hardware gap is what makes the Mate X6 so significant in the context of Apple’s entry. When Apple launches a foldable, it will be judged not against Samsung’s 2019 effort but against Huawei’s 2025 one. The bar has been raised dramatically.

Consider the thinness question. Apple has made device slimness a core part of its brand identity — the iPhone 17 Air, expected later this year, is reportedly Apple’s thinnest phone ever. A foldable iPhone that’s thicker than the Mate X6 when closed would undercut that narrative immediately. And matching Huawei’s 9.85mm profile while also incorporating Apple’s own silicon, camera systems, and battery expectations is an engineering problem that doesn’t have easy answers.

Then there’s the crease. Apple’s user base has extremely low tolerance for visible hardware imperfections. The notch on the iPhone X was controversial enough, and that was a static design element. A crease that appears and deepens over time — as it does on virtually every foldable — would be a far harder sell to consumers conditioned by Apple’s marketing to expect flawless industrial design. Huawei’s near-invisible crease on the Mate X6 sets the benchmark Apple will need to meet or exceed.

Software is where the dynamic shifts. Huawei’s global devices run HarmonyOS, the company’s homegrown operating system that lacks access to Google Play Services, Gmail, YouTube, and the vast majority of apps Western users rely on daily. In China, this isn’t a problem — Huawei’s app store and local alternatives fill the gap. Internationally, it’s a dealbreaker for most consumers. The Mate X6 can be purchased in Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia, but its market share outside China remains modest precisely because of this software limitation.

Apple, by contrast, would launch a foldable with iOS, the App Store, and the full weight of its services integration behind it. That’s an enormous advantage. No other company can match the depth of Apple’s first-party software optimization, and the prospect of running iPadOS-style multitasking on a foldable screen — or even a dedicated foldable mode within iOS — is something developers and consumers would embrace immediately.

So the competitive picture is more nuanced than a simple spec sheet comparison suggests. Huawei builds better foldable hardware than anyone right now. Full stop. But it sells that hardware into a constrained market, limited by geopolitics and software access. Apple will likely build a less ambitious first-generation foldable but sell it into every market on earth with software that no Android manufacturer can replicate.

The financial stakes are substantial. Foldable phones remain a niche category — Counterpoint Research estimated global foldable shipments at roughly 18 million units in 2024, a fraction of the 1.2 billion smartphones sold overall. But the category is growing, and it commands premium pricing. Samsung’s Z Fold 6 starts at $1,899. Huawei’s Mate X6 is priced at €1,999 in Europe. If Apple enters at a similar price point, even modest adoption among its installed base of over a billion active iPhones would represent a multibillion-dollar revenue opportunity.

Wall Street has taken notice. Analysts at Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan have both published notes in recent months suggesting that a foldable iPhone could add $5 to $8 billion in annual revenue for Apple within two years of launch, driven by upgrade demand from existing iPhone users and competitive switching from Samsung’s foldable lineup.

Huawei, meanwhile, has its own financial motivations. The company doesn’t publicly report detailed smartphone revenue figures, but third-party estimates from Canalys and IDC show Huawei’s smartphone shipments surging in China throughout 2024 and into 2025, driven largely by the Mate and Pura series. The foldable lineup — including the Mate X6 and the Mate XT Ultimate — positions Huawei at the top of the premium segment in its home market, where it competes directly with Apple for affluent consumers.

There’s a geopolitical dimension here that can’t be ignored. Huawei’s ability to produce competitive chips and devices despite being cut off from American technology has become a point of national pride in China and a source of anxiety in Washington. Each new Huawei product launch is scrutinized not just for its consumer appeal but for what it reveals about China’s semiconductor self-sufficiency. The Kirin 9100 in the Mate X6, believed to be manufactured by SMIC using a process node roughly equivalent to TSMC’s 7nm or 5nm, represents a significant technical achievement regardless of how it compares to Apple’s A-series or M-series chips in raw performance.

For Apple, the competitive threat from Huawei is most acute in China, where iPhone sales have been under pressure. Data from Counterpoint showed Apple’s market share in China declining in early 2025 as Huawei’s resurgence accelerated. A foldable iPhone could help Apple reclaim some of that ground, but only if it arrives with hardware that doesn’t look dated next to what Huawei is already shipping.

And that’s the real significance of the Mate X6’s timing. By pushing the boundaries of foldable design now — thinner, wider, better cameras, near-invisible crease — Huawei is defining what “good enough” looks like before Apple even enters the ring. It’s a preemptive move, designed to ensure that whatever Apple announces will be measured against Huawei’s standard rather than Samsung’s.

Samsung, for its part, appears to be responding. Leaks suggest the Galaxy Z Fold 7, expected in the second half of 2025, will feature a significantly wider inner display and a thinner profile — changes that look suspiciously like responses to Huawei’s design language. The South Korean company has dominated foldable sales globally for years, but its design evolution has been incremental, and the Mate X6 exposes just how much room for improvement existed.

Google’s Pixel foldable line adds another variable. The Pixel 9 Pro Fold earned strong reviews for its software experience and camera quality, though its hardware was considered a step behind Samsung and Huawei. Google’s advantage, like Apple’s, is software integration — Gemini AI features, seamless continuity between folded and unfolded states, and deep Android optimization. But Google lacks Apple’s scale and brand loyalty in hardware.

The foldable market in 2025 is shaping up as a three-way race between design ambition, software excellence, and global market access. Huawei leads on the first count. Apple will almost certainly lead on the second. Samsung currently owns the third. No single company dominates all three — yet.

What makes this moment particularly interesting for industry observers is the speed of iteration. Foldable phones in 2019 were fragile curiosities with visible creases, unreliable hinges, and screens that cracked within days. Six years later, the Mate X6 is water-resistant, thinner than an iPhone 15 Pro Max, and durable enough for daily use. That rate of improvement suggests the category is approaching a tipping point where foldables stop being a novelty and start being a mainstream option for premium buyers.

Apple’s entry would accelerate that transition dramatically. When Apple enters a product category — as it did with smartphones in 2007, tablets in 2010, and smartwatches in 2015 — it tends to expand the total addressable market rather than simply taking share from existing players. A foldable iPhone wouldn’t just compete with Samsung and Huawei. It would legitimize the form factor for hundreds of millions of consumers who’ve been waiting for Apple’s implicit endorsement before making the leap.

Huawei knows this. And by launching the Mate X6 now, with specifications and design quality that will be difficult for any competitor to surpass quickly, it’s ensuring that when Apple does arrive, the conversation won’t be about whether foldables are ready for the mainstream. It’ll be about whether Apple’s version is as good as Huawei’s.

That’s a remarkable position for a company operating under some of the most restrictive technology sanctions in modern history. And it’s a position that should make Cupertino very uncomfortable.