Google On How It Tests Pixel Phones For Durability

Officially, the Pixel 9 is “twice as durable as Pixel 8,” with Google crediting the new design language. A new blog post from the company this week discusses the internal testing process.

The Product Integrity Engineering team is tasked with making “sure Pixel phones will survive day-to-day wear and tear.” This involves creating and performing stress, durability, and temperature tests. The process starts with “trying to really understand all the scenarios in which a customer is going to use our products.” 

“Then we design tests that have to be repeatable and explainable to our design teams: We’re trying to scientifically discover what causes such-and-such a result, like an internal connector shaking loose, so they can design the devices to fix those problems.”

This is called Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis, with an emphasis on practical situations and tests. Google is not necessarily designing for edge cases that most people won’t encounter.

“We don’t want to let people feel like they can do anything with our products, but it’s amazing to surprise them when something bad does happen, and yet their phone survives. That moment when they pick up their phone and they don’t see a broken display or the camera works — that’s where the delight is.”

Specific tests Google shared include:

• “…a robotic arm slid[ing] a tablet in and out of a backpack over and over again to simulate unpacking or packing your bag at the start of each day.”
• “…drop several tablets from a low height over and over again to see how they’d hold up to small drops.”
• “…machine [that] uses a motor to vigorously shake devices to see how they survive.”

There’s a high altitude test to see “what happens to our phones at 14,000 feet, for instance, because if there’s an unpressurized aircraft that’s transporting our phones, we don’t want them to break.”

On the temperature front, there’s testing to see how “devices survive at temperatures ranging from -30ºC (-22ºF) to 75ºC (167ºF).” That translates to real-world scenarios like “accidentally leav[ing] your phone out in the sun on a hot summer’s day, or subject[ing] your Pixel to rapid temperature changes when you leave your toasty home for the frigid outdoors in the winter.”

Finally, the most interesting part of the piece was about a product’s design margin:

“One of the most important pieces of feedback we provide to the design team is on what’s known as the design margin of the product,” Ajay says. “For example, we ask, ‘How many more drops can this phone take? If 90% of users drop their phones a certain number of times a year, how can we build something that survives even more than that?’ And these decisions are especially important as we build phones to last even longer.”

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