4 reasons I think smartphones still aren’t durable enough

To give credit where credit’s due, modern smartphones can be pretty resilient. My

iPhone 16 Pro
, for instance, sports a titanium shell as well as crack- and scratch-resistant glass. When it comes to water and dust, it has an

IP68 rating
— it’s effectively dustproof, and can survive submersion in fresh water to 6 meters (19.7 feet) for 30 minutes. Compare that with the original

2007 iPhone
didn’t have an IP rating at all. You were taking quite a gamble the moment you went outdoors. Even your home or office was risky — it’s not like kitchen tile is that much softer than asphalt.

We’ve still got a ways to go, though, before I’ll be confident taking a phone anywhere without a case. Indeed, we’ve actually gone backwards in some ways from the pre-smartphone era. I doubt companies will solve that anytime soon, given their priorities, but it’s worth pointing out issues in the hope that they do.

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1

It’s still too easy to damage the back of your phone

Form shouldn’t triumph over function

Tesla

While many phones now use titanium or aluminum shells to protect their internal components, these materials are typically paired with some form of Corning Gorilla Glass (or an equivalent). Corning’s engineers seem to be doing good work — at the end of the day, however, glass is glass, as Tesla demonstrated all too vividly with the Cybertruck. It’s still going to crack or scratch when enough force is applied, and no one wants to carry around a phone with ugly spider fractures on the back. That’s why I always recommend people buy rugged cases for their phones instead of something slimmer and more attractive. There’s no sense risking your phone’s resale value in the name of chasing good looks.

Smartphone makers and buyers alike need to get over the need for “sexy” electronics. Instead of glass, I’d personally much rather have thick plastic, or even rubber. Those materials are what many early cellphones used, including the Nokia 3310, which was famously so tough that you could run it over with a car without doing major damage. I doubt any Pixel 9 owners are eager to repeat that experiment.

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2

Sometimes IP68 isn’t enough

Thousand-dollar phones deserve thousand-dollar protection

OnePlus

Honestly, in most circumstances, IP68 water resistance is excellent. It’ll save your phone if you accidentally spill some sambuca on it at the bar, or drop it in the toilet or bathtub at home. You’ll even be fine if you get caught in a rainstorm. It’s a wise idea to dry a phone off after any liquid exposure, but for most practical purposes, a lot of modern devices are waterproof. I’m still amazed by that occasionally, remembering what things were like as a ’90s kid. It doesn’t feel like any device with an open port should be safe.

Note that I said “most” purposes and “a lot” of phones. You still can’t take most phones in the shower, let alone swim with them, and you may be truly screwed if you drop your phone in pool or ocean water. Chlorine and salt tend to eat through a device’s water seals. There’s probably little phone makers can do about those corrosive substances, but I’m hoping that the industry will eventually move towards standardizing

IP69/IP69K
resistance — enough to protect against jets of high-pressure, high-temperature water. There are very few IP69 phones on the market at the moment, perhaps the best known being the OnePlus 13. It could be the harbinger of a new trend, if we’re lucky.

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3

Screens are too exposed

A little raised bezel won’t kill you

For well over a decade now, the trend in smartphones has been towards thinner and thinner bezels, or in some cases eliminating them completely. There are some practical benefits to this — it becomes easier to swipe things on- and off-screen, for example — but it’s mostly done for visual appeal. Shoppers seem to associate minimal bezels with advanced design, presumably because thick bezels were unavoidable with earlier technology. There was no way Samsung’s first Galaxy S was going to duplicate the look of the Galaxy S25 Ultra.

There’s a reason why many cases have raised lips, though — the closer a phone’s screen glass gets to the edge, the more likely it is to crack or scratch in a drop. No one should have to buy a case to prevent this damage, especially when it’s perfectly possible to build a raised lip directly into an aluminum or titanium body. It’s not even a sacrifice in aesthetics, really — it can look pretty stylish if it’s done right.

Things actually get worse if you add foldables into the mix. All foldables have two displays, with the internal one actually being the most vulnerable, owing to softer materials and a higher risk of dust intrusion. You can get a water-resistant foldable, but not really a dustproof one.

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4

Cosmetic damage is all too frequent

What’s the point of color that scratches off?

Naturally, there’s some overlap in this point with my previous ones, but I wanted to emphasize the fact that for all the effort smartphone makers put into their aesthetics, it’s still too easy to ruin them. Ask yourself — would you put your iPhone 16e in the same pocket as your keys? Probably not, since just jostling things around would likely result in a scratch sooner or later. It’s a bad idea regardless, but the point about fragility remains, and women don’t even get the luxury of pockets in many of their clothes — they have to jam their phone in a bag or purse along with everything else that happens to be in there.

The proliferation of shiny materials and exposed glass is concerning. On top of that, though, the color schemes phones use will too often fade, chip, or scratch away. Does it affect the practical use of a phone? No. But if you’ve spent $1,000 or more on an iPhone 16 Pro, it’s a little disheartening to see bits of its color coating chipped away in a matter of months. Because of that, I always slap a case on my phones as soon as possible, and even my Apple Watches. People make fun of watch cases right up until their $800 luxury purchase takes a hit from a doorknob.

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