Z Fold Longevity Study — 2026

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.

What's in the report

• 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

Filtering rules

The cleaned dataset excludes responses where any of the following apply:

1. Not factory new — used or refurbished devices have unknown history.
2. 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.
3. Outer-screen self-break — outer breaks "with no fault of my own" are nearly always drops; excluded to reduce noise.
4. 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
5. "I don't own any of them" plus the very small Z TriFold and Z Fold SE samples (sample sizes < 10) are excluded.

Running locally

The site is fully static. Any HTTP server in the docs/ directory works:

python3 -m http.server 8000 --directory docs
# then open http://localhost:8000

Opening index.html directly with file:// won't work because the page fetches stats.json at runtime.

Regenerating the stats

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.py

The 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.

Source layout

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

Prior studies

• 2024 results on r/GalaxyFold
• 2025 results on r/GalaxyFold

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

This project is independent and not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd.