Corning’s new ceramic glass might save your next phone from disaster

Gorilla Glass Ceramic will appear on its first phone in the coming months.

As a society, we have decided to carry expensive electronic devices that are made out of glass. It's a real problem, especially if you have butter fingers. Gorilla Glass maker Corning has announced a new material that might help save the day the next time you drop a phone. The company claims its latest Gorilla Glass Ceramic can withstand drops that would shatter lesser materials.

As the name implies, Corning's new glass incorporates ceramic components to improve strength compared to other types of hardened glass. Corning has offered a bit of data to support this claim. In its lab tests (PDF), Gorilla Glass Ceramic withstood 10 drops from one meter onto surfaces that closely resemble asphalt. Why Corning does not use real asphalt for this test is unclear. Regardless, the company says an unspecified "competitive" type of aluminosilicate glass would typically fail on the first drop.

Chemically strengthened glass has been a key component in the proliferation of smartphones across the world. Since the company provided the glass for that first iPhone back in 2007, it has made glass for more than 7 billion devices. That makes Corning the largest glass supplier in the mobile industry, but it does face increasing competition in the budget and midrange segments.

Corning does not directly compare Gorilla Glass Ceramic to the popular Gorilla Glass Victus 2, which was, until now, its most durable offering. That material can allegedly survive drops onto similarly rough surfaces, but the company doesn't specify a number like it does with the new ceramic version. Corning also has its Gorilla Glass Armor series, which has been used on the last few generations of Samsung Galaxy Ultra flagships. This glass has anti-reflective properties, which appear absent in Gorilla Glass Ceramic.

This is not Corning's first swing at adding ceramic to the mix—the company is also responsible for Apple's Ceramic Shield glass, which has been used on the company's high-end phones since 2021. Apple fans have been largely impressed with the strength of Ceramic Shield, too. With the debut of Gorilla Glass Ceramic, we'll be seeing Android phones with ceramic protection. However, we expect this to be a material for more expensive devices.

The glass sandwich

It may seem odd that the industry spends so much time developing stronger glass instead of moving to other, less fragile materials in phones, but there are reasons to use it. Glass is less prone to scratching compared to plastic, so it's natural to expect it on the screen side. Using glass for the back of a phone enables wireless charging and magnetic attachment, which people have come to expect in premium phones. Using glass can improve wireless signal strength compared to fully metal bodies, too.

Putting glass inside an aluminum frame makes phones extremely hard to bend.

Credit: Ryan Whitwam

Glass also has some mechanical advantages you might not realize. Remember bendgate, when Apple's sleek aluminum phones would acquire banana-like bends simply from riding around in your front pocket? That doesn't happen anymore because most high-end (i.e., not plastic) phones have adopted the glass sandwich design. Glass has low tensile strength, which is why it cracks when struck, but its compressive strength is off the chart. So placing a pane of strengthened glass inside a metal frame makes the device extremely stiff and resistant to bending. There are trade-offs, but everyone adopted the glass sandwich for a reason.

We're interested to see if Gorilla Glass Ceramic makes handling a phone less precarious. Corning announces new versions of Gorilla Glass regularly, but you won't always see its latest materials across the board. In this case, Corning says Motorola will be the first to offer it "in the coming months." Presumably, that means it will be used on the exterior of the next foldable Razr.

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