Where it lands is the biggest factor. A phone will almost never break if it falls on soft grass or mud. And no phone is surviving a high velocity drop onto concrete.

Angle of fall is another big one. From what I've seen phones are generally fine if they fall face up or down, but even a slight bump on the edges is enough to crack the glass.

By the looks of the tweet, high possibility of some shrubs slowing it down and absorbing some energy before it came to a stop?

Yes, that and it also had a case and screen protector on it. Plus it landed on grass/dirt vs asphalt.

It landed on grass/dirt. On the photos on Twitter there seems to be some thick vegetation. Seeing the drops on the screen, if it has rained, then it would make the ground even softer.

If it would have landed on the asphalt, concrete, marble it would have looked very different!

Vegetation can also help to break velocity. People fell out of planes and survived by falling into trees and snow underneath. The smaller branches of the trees very much acted like a crumple zone on a car - giving way and breaking, but taking away little chunks of energy everytime.

Then why does my phone break when I drop it?

Because there isn't much difference in the force between a 1m and a 8000m drop due to the above. So it really comes down to case, angle, and material onto which it was dropped with corners being more vulnerable.

There is. Dropping your phone follows a curve, it falling from 16,000ft it does not. There are more forces at play when you fumble your phone. They aren't necessarily stronger forces though...just more of them. Trajectory and spinning add different forces on top of gravity. There is also the catch attempt that invariably forces the phone down harder and changes the trajectory.

Surface, angle of contact, luck.

One of my phones made multiple falls onto asphalt and iron grates to no worse than superficial edge band scratches.

One day it flipped onto my desk from a few inches and that cracked the screen.

Yeah. I’ve dropped my phone though rarely hard. A few months ago I was hiking with the phone in my pocket and some sort of impact (there was a lot of scrambling over rock) caved in the phone from the back through the case and completely destroyed it.

Low LUCK attribute.

Guess they chose a different feat then. Or took the +2 ability bump instead of a feat.

because you’re dropping it on tiles or pavement which are a lot less squishy than the grass it landed on

It didn't have time to turn around and stretch in order to slow itself down.

Or maybe that's cats. Cats reputedly have a higher chance to survive a long drop than a short one because the long one gives them time to catch themselves and maybe slow down.

No protection? I drop mine from time to time and never experienced any damage

I drop my iPhone 12 mini on the daily onto marble floor, asphalt and concrete .. sometimes it flings out of my hands with an arc to it. Slippery little thing, it is.

Only the edges are a bit scratched up.

I am pretty sure ALL phones that are on sale today have better glass than my Nexus 4 which had a beautiful glass panel on its back. Gorgeous but not strong at all.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/LG_Nexus...

That's just some luck.

I recently dropped mine by tagging by earphone wire and it landed on the top corner with a spectacular bang and cracked the whole screen.

Though it's the second phone I drop with consequences, after Ericsson A1018s.

Other people usually aren't that lucky.

you're holding it wrong

Does it? I have had a caseless iPhone for years, I drop it on hard surfaces a few times a week, and it’s fine except for a few scratches on the edges.

> the phone itself is fragile

Modern electronics are quite the opposite of fragile, I'd say.

It's not a huge leap of faith to assume they mean the phone as in the thing covered in glass and fragile touchscreen.

> It's not a huge leap of faith to assume they mean the phone as in the thing covered in glass and fragile touchscreen.

Not all phones are fragile. Ones with bodies made out of glass or aluminium are, ones with "nice to glide your finger along" glass screens can be. But those "features" are found in expensive phones.

Cheap phones, with their plastic bodies, flexible touch screens and removable batteries that tend to leave the case on impact are remarkably robust. As in "riding bike at 30km / hour, phone leaps out of pocket smashes into concrete gutter, covers and battery fly this way and that and so you have to dodge traffic to retrieve them" are perfectly fine after the incident, after reassembly. In fact on of my phones survived multiple rounds of that treatment.

Cheap phones being robust and expensive ones being delicate is a bug bear of mine. The one caveat is cheap phones are never water proof.

Cheap or expensive, I've never see the phones electronics damaged by an impact.

Even the screen with its tempered glass isn't as fragile as it might look.

If it wasn't fragile - people would not buy cases and protective glass for their phone.

Old plastic phones were indestructible. I still have somewhere nokia 3310. It just refuses to die, unlike many smartphones I had.

Modern phones aren't fragile but they are slippery, and it's still annoying to drop them especially if it can go down a grate or something. So a case prevents that.

> If it wasn't fragile - people would not buy cases and protective glass for their phone.

Well for my money I think they're mostly nonsense.

I never use them and despite living in my pockets for years, my phone aren't scratched up. Cases are annoying and unwieldy, making it more likely I would drop my phone, and screen protectors make the screen look worse - which I think is what they're supposed to prevent?

I often go 5+ years with the same phone, so it's not like I write them off any faster. My S2 and S5 both lasted for ages, and they both still work perfectly fine - the only issue is that software "outgrew" them.

They're very obviously not nonsense, look at all the shattered screens on phones around out.

And there's absolutely 0 chance your screen doesn't have a ton of microscratches.

Well, it is quite surprising