For years, the visible crease running down the center of foldable smartphones has been the technology’s most stubborn cosmetic flaw — a constant reminder that the device in your hand is, in fact, two screens forced into one. Now, a wave of Chinese manufacturers is on the verge of eliminating that crease entirely, and they’re doing it while Apple hasn’t even shipped its first foldable and Samsung continues to iterate on a design that still bears the telltale fold line.
The race to produce a truly creaseless foldable phone has become one of the most consequential battles in the smartphone industry, not because the crease itself is a dealbreaker for most consumers, but because solving it signals mastery over the underlying engineering challenges — flexible glass, hinge mechanisms, and display lamination — that will define the next generation of mobile devices.
Chinese Brands Set the Pace While Giants Play Catch-Up
As Digital Trends reported in a detailed analysis, companies like Honor, OPPO, and Xiaomi are aggressively pushing toward creaseless foldable displays, with some models already exhibiting dramatically reduced crease visibility compared to Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold series. Honor’s Magic V3, released in 2024, was widely praised for its remarkably thin profile and minimal crease. The company has signaled that its next iteration could effectively eliminate the fold line altogether.
The key breakthrough has been in ultra-thin glass (UTG) technology and new hinge architectures. Samsung, which pioneered the mainstream foldable market with the Galaxy Fold in 2019, has relied on its own UTG supplier, Dowoo Insys, for years. But Chinese competitors have been sourcing from alternative suppliers and investing heavily in proprietary hinge designs that distribute stress more evenly across the display surface. Xiaomi’s MIX Fold series, for instance, has employed a waterdrop-style hinge that creates a larger radius at the fold point, significantly reducing the permanent deformation that causes the crease.
The Engineering Behind the Crease — and Why It’s So Hard to Kill
Understanding why the crease exists requires understanding the physics of folding a display. OLED panels, even flexible ones, consist of multiple thin layers — the substrate, the organic light-emitting layer, the touch-sensitive digitizer, and a protective cover. When these layers are folded repeatedly at a tight radius, the materials experience differential stress. The inner layers compress while the outer layers stretch. Over time, this creates a permanent deformation visible as a ridge or valley along the fold axis.
Samsung’s approach has been to use ultra-thin glass as the top layer, which provides a harder, more scratch-resistant surface than plastic film but is inherently less forgiving when bent. The company has progressively reduced the crease over successive Galaxy Z Fold generations, but the improvement from one year to the next has been incremental rather than transformative. According to Digital Trends, Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Z Fold 7, expected later in 2025, may narrow the gap but is unlikely to fully eliminate the crease.
Honor and OPPO Push the Boundaries of What’s Possible
Honor has been particularly aggressive. The company’s Magic V series has earned consistent praise from reviewers for display quality and crease reduction. Reports from Chinese tech media and hands-on previews suggest that Honor is working with display panel suppliers including BOE and Visionox on next-generation flexible OLED panels that use new polymer substrates capable of withstanding hundreds of thousands of folds with virtually no permanent deformation. Honor CEO George Zhao has publicly stated that the company’s goal is to make the crease “invisible to both the eye and the touch.”
OPPO’s Find N series took a different tack early on, using a wider aspect ratio and a less aggressive fold angle to minimize crease formation. The Find N3, released in late 2023, was one of the first foldables where reviewers noted the crease was difficult to see under normal lighting conditions. While OPPO has been restructuring its product lines and merging operations more closely with OnePlus, the engineering knowledge accumulated through the Find N program continues to inform new devices.
Apple’s Conspicuous Absence and Samsung’s Incremental Strategy
Apple, meanwhile, remains on the sidelines — at least publicly. Multiple reports from analysts including Ming-Chi Kuo and Jeff Pu, as well as reporting from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, have indicated that Apple is developing a foldable iPhone, but the company has reportedly been unwilling to ship a product with a visible crease. This perfectionism, characteristic of Apple’s product development philosophy, has meant that the company is likely waiting for display technology to mature to the point where a crease-free experience is achievable at scale.
That wait may be getting shorter. Display industry analysts at DSCC (Display Supply Chain Consultants) have noted that creaseless or near-creaseless foldable display panels could reach mass production readiness by late 2025 or early 2026. If accurate, this timeline would align with the most optimistic projections for an Apple foldable launch, potentially in 2026 or 2027. But it also means that by the time Apple enters the market, Chinese brands will have been selling creaseless foldables for a year or more — a significant head start in consumer perception and manufacturing experience.
Material Science Breakthroughs Are Changing the Calculus
The technical advances enabling creaseless foldables go beyond hinge design. New cover materials are emerging that combine the hardness of glass with the flexibility of plastic. Samsung’s own display arm, Samsung Display, has been developing hybrid materials that layer ceramic-like hard coatings over flexible polymer bases. Corning, the maker of Gorilla Glass, has also been working on bendable glass solutions, though the company has been characteristically tight-lipped about specific product timelines.
Perhaps more importantly, the adhesive layers that bond the various display components together are being reformulated. These optical clear adhesives (OCAs) must remain transparent, flexible, and durable over the life of the device. Traditional OCAs tend to develop memory — they deform permanently when held in a folded position for extended periods, contributing to crease formation even if the display panel itself recovers. Newer formulations from suppliers like Henkel and Dupont are designed to be more elastic, recovering their original shape more completely after being folded.
The Consumer Perception Problem and Market Implications
For all the engineering effort being poured into crease elimination, consumer surveys suggest that the crease is not the primary barrier to foldable adoption. Price, durability concerns, and app optimization remain larger obstacles. A 2024 survey by Counterpoint Research found that only 18% of respondents who were hesitant about foldables cited the crease as their top concern, compared to 42% who cited price and 27% who cited durability.
Still, the crease has become a symbolic issue — a visible imperfection that critics point to as evidence that foldable technology isn’t ready for the mainstream. Eliminating it removes a powerful talking point for skeptics and allows manufacturers to market their foldables as mature, polished products rather than early-adopter experiments. For Apple in particular, which has built its brand on fit and finish, shipping a device with a visible crease would be a reputational risk that the company appears unwilling to take.
What Comes Next in the Foldable Arms Race
The competitive dynamics are clear. Samsung, which commands roughly 60% of the global foldable market by shipments according to data from IDC, faces the uncomfortable reality that its hardware lead is narrowing while Chinese competitors undercut it on price and increasingly match or exceed it on display quality. The Galaxy Z Fold 7 and Z Flip 7, expected in the second half of 2025, will be closely watched for crease improvements.
Meanwhile, Huawei — despite operating under U.S. sanctions that limit its access to certain components — has also been producing impressive foldables. The Mate X5 and the tri-fold Mate XT, which Huawei launched to considerable fanfare in China, demonstrate that even constrained supply chains can yield innovative form factors. Huawei’s willingness to experiment with triple-fold designs suggests the company is thinking beyond the current book-style and flip-style paradigms.
The broader implication is that the center of gravity in foldable phone innovation has shifted decisively toward China. While Samsung invented the category and Apple may eventually perfect it for its own customer base, the companies doing the hardest, fastest work on the crease problem — and on foldable design more generally — are based in Shenzhen, Dongguan, and Beijing. By the time a creaseless iPhone reaches store shelves, Honor, Xiaomi, and OPPO may already be on their second or third generation of crease-free devices, having worked out the manufacturing kinks and driven costs down in the process.
The crease, in other words, is more than a cosmetic issue. It is a proxy for the broader competitive struggle between established Western and Korean tech giants and an ascendant Chinese hardware industry that is no longer content to follow.
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