Some Nexus 6P rear glass panels are spontaneously cracking

We’ve been doing this long enough to know that no matter much how quality control testing goes into building a new device — no matter if it’s from Apple or Android OEM — weird issues can occasionally pop up. With the whole Nexus 6P “bending issue” out of the way (the verdict is it can bend, so exercise a teeny bit more caution with it), some users are experiencing something that’s a little more legitimate.

As brought to light by a user on Reddit (and corroborated by several others in the thread), the back glass that covers the camera, LED flash, laser autofocus, and other sensors, can spontaneously shatter — all on its own. Although these things are always hard to confirm (our review unit is still fine, by the way), affected users are saying this occurred without any misuse on their part. While the phone is laying down, all of a sudden a cracking noise is heard and bam — the class is all kinds of cracked.

The difficult part is figuring out why this is happening. As any Reddit engineer and they’ll tell you it could have something to do with the phone’s all-metal design bending or contracting with temperature or elevation changes (someone’s front display apparently cracked while taking a flight). Remember all the spontaneously cracked Nexus 4 backs from a few years back? Yeah. The odd part is that Apple, HTC, and others managed to pull off a similar all-metal designs without cracking glass issues like this, so we’re not sure what’s really the cause.

In any case, manufacturer defects like this are more than often covered under warranty, be it from the retailer you purchased it from, Google, or Huawei. But because spontaneous physical damage can be difficult to prove, we wanted to shed as much light on this issue and avoid any difficulty when attempting to process a claim.