A community-sourced reliability study of every Samsung Galaxy Z Fold generation, from the original Fold through the Fold 7, published as a static site on GitHub Pages.
Live site: https://macusercom.github.io/z-fold-longevity-study/
This is the third annual edition of the study (2024 / 2025 / 2026). The 2026 dataset has 745 raw responses from 745 owners. After applying the agreed filtering rules, 527 responses are used for the per-generation analysis.
- Headline TL;DR comparing the Fold 7 against every prior generation in their first year of ownership only (apples-to-apples)
- Per-generation snapshot cards (RMA, inner-screen breaks, default-protector peeling, micro cracks, hinge flatness, folds-per-day, screen-usage)
- Interactive year-by-year breakdown across Year 1, Year 2 and Beyond Year 2
- The "peeling → cracks → break" causal chain, with risk multipliers
- Inner-screen-protector impact comparison
- Myth-busting charts on folds-per-day and inner-vs-outer screen usage
- Stacked surface-degradation breakdown by ownership duration
- Methodology, exclusion rules and limitations
The cleaned dataset excludes responses where any of the following apply:
- Not factory new — used or refurbished devices have unknown history.
- Outer protector sanity check — the Fold doesn't ship with a pre-applied outer protector, so anyone selecting that option is treated as a misread.
- Outer-screen self-break — outer breaks "with no fault of my own" are nearly always drops; excluded to reduce noise.
- Device-age sanity caps — calibrated to each generation's launch date as of May 2026:
- Fold 7 (Jul 2025): max 7–12 mo
- Fold 6 (Jul 2024): max 19–24 mo
- Fold 5 (Jul 2023): max 25–36 mo
- Outside the studied lineup — anything not in
DEVICE_ORDER: "I don't own any of them" (9 responses), Z TriFold (7) and Z Fold SE (2), all far below the n ≥ 10 threshold.
Two different reasons sit behind the placeholder cards the site shows:
- The Z Fold 8 and Z Fold 8 Ultra were announced on 22 July 2026 and go on sale in early August 2026 — months after the May 2026 cutoff — so no response for them was possible. They are mainstream devices and will be covered from the 2027 edition onward.
- The Z TriFold (7 responses, only 3 of them clean) and Z Fold SE (2) were on sale and did get responses, just far too few to be conclusive. The TriFold launched 12 December 2025 in South Korea and reached only selected markets since; the Fold SE was China/Korea-only. Whether either clears the n ≥ 10 threshold depends on turnout, so their inclusion in 2027 is not guaranteed. The site shows them as placeholder cards in the per-generation grid and in the "What's next" section, driven by
PENDING_DEVICESinanalysis/analyze.py.
The site is fully static. Any HTTP server in the docs/ directory works:
python3 -m http.server 8000 --directory docs
# then open http://localhost:8000Opening index.html directly with file:// won't work because the page fetches stats.json at runtime.
docs/stats.json is the aggregated data the page renders from. It is generated from the raw response CSV at docs/Samsung-Z-Fold-Questionnaire-2026.csv by a single standard-library Python script:
python3 analysis/analyze.pyThe full specification — filter rules, schema, what to update each year, and a manual reproduction recipe — lives at analysis/README.md. Both files are checked in so anyone can audit and reproduce the published numbers from scratch.
docs/ Static site (GitHub Pages root)
index.html Main report
style.css Theme (dark / neon)
app.js Chart.js wiring and dynamic content
stats.json Aggregated study data (generated)
Samsung-Z-Fold-Questionnaire-2026.csv Raw response CSV (downloadable)
privacy.html Privacy policy
imprint.html Legal notice
og-image.svg Social card
sitemap.xml / robots.txt SEO
analysis/ Reproducible stats pipeline
analyze.py Single-file aggregator (no deps)
README.md Full rebuild specification
MIT. See LICENSE.
This project is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.