A Pixel's tale of survival after months in the snow

Last February, Andrew Prag was skiing in Serre Chevalier, France, where he has family, when he lost his Pixel 6a in the snow at the end of his last day on the mountain. While he was able to geolocate it that afternoon and planned to track it down the next day, an overnight snowfall eliminated any hope he’d ever find it again. At least, that’s what he thought.

Six months later, Andrew was again visiting family, and decided to try to find his wayward phone. “Everyone thought I was nuts to try,” says Andrew, who works at the We Mean Business Coalition, which partners closely with Google on climate advocacy. “Sure enough, after poking around for a bit, I found it nestled in the grass and wildflowers, covered in mud.”

Even more impressive than finding the phone? After months buried in the snow, mud and rain, it still worked. “I just plugged it in and switched it on as though it had been sitting in a drawer all that time,” Andrew says.

While Andrew was shocked at how his Pixel 6a had survived months in the great outdoors, Googler Ajay Kamath was less surprised — he had experienced something similar a few months earlier.

“It happened to my daughter's Pixel this ski season,” Ajay says. “We were in Tahoe, and as she was going up the lift, she dropped her Pixel 6a into the snow. We didn't know exactly where it was. Five days later, the snow had melted more, and we were able to find it — the phone was actually still on in battery saver mode.”

Ajay leads the Product Integrity Engineering team, which puts Google hardware through all sorts of stress, durability and temperature tests — all to make sure Pixel phones will survive day-to-day wear and tear (and sometimes more). “We can't say Pixel phones will always survive in these extreme conditions, but I'm personally not surprised that some have,” he says.

“We start by trying to really understand all the scenarios in which a customer is going to use our products,” Ajay says. “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.”

Those tests can include some fairly out-there trials. One test, for example, saw a robotic arm slide 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. Another saw the team drop several tablets from a low height over and over again to see how they’d hold up to small drops; in a third test, a machine uses a motor to vigorously shake devices to see how they survive.

The team uses a technique known as Design Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (DFMEA) to understand the failure modes and create relevant tests. They aren’t just trying to break phones — they want to see how they fail, what kinds of tests they need to identify weak points and then what changes or improvements need to be made to fix those problems.

“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.”

While the team could dream up any kind of test, they root their testing in practical scenarios. “We test for things like high altitude — 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,” Ajay says. “But testing what would happen if a phone fell out of a plane — for curiosity’s sake? Sure, it's a fun test to think about, but that’s not a use case that happens often enough worth designing an entire product around.”

Still, the practical tests the teams conduct could help our devices survive more outlandish scenarios, if (and when) they come up. That might explain how the two Pixel phones survived their time in the snow. The team tests how our devices survive at temperatures ranging from -30ºC (-22ºF) to 75ºC (167ºF), for instance, to help see what will happen when you accidentally leave your phone out in the sun on a hot summer's day, or subject your Pixel to rapid temperature changes when you leave your toasty home for the frigid outdoors in the winter.

Similarly, while snow isn’t on the testing docket, the Pixel 6a that Andrew left outside for six months was certified (with an ingress protection rating) for water and dust resistance. "So the phones are relatively sealed from the elements, the snow cover kept them relatively protected, and the charging circuit was most likely disabled, saving the battery," Ajay says. "Our phones aren't designed for that scenario, but everything else they're tested and designed for might help them survive."

So, should we all start throwing our phones at walls or leaving them in the wilderness? “I wouldn’t recommend it,” Ajay says with a laugh. “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.”