The iPhone turns 20 in 2027, and Apple apparently wants to throw a party that people will remember. Sources believe that the company is targeting a radical redesign for what will likely be called the iPhone 20, skipping “iPhone 19” the same way it jumped directly to the iPhone X back in 2017. More than just a naming trick, it came with the full-screen OLED design, Face ID, and the removal of the home button, a move that felt genuinely shocking at the time. The expectation building around the iPhone 20 is that history is supposed to repeat itself, only bigger.
The appetite is clearly there. Interest in bold Apple hardware has been riding high on the back of iPhone Fold rumors, and the search interest in “iPhone 20 design” has shot up by over 3,100% year-over-year. People are hungry for a leap, not an incremental shuffle. What Apple is reportedly planning, an all-glass unibody with no physical buttons and no visible cutouts anywhere on the device, is exactly the kind of leap that generates excitement. Whether it generates anything more than that is a genuinely open question.
Images courtesy of: AppleTrack
iPhone X (2017)
What it isn’t: an all-screen phone
Before the imagination runs completely wild, it helps to be specific about what “all-glass” is not. This is not a Xiaomi Mi Mix Alpha situation, where the display wraps entirely around the phone like a very expensive, very fragile bracelet. That concept, for all its visual drama, would introduce a cascade of problems: iOS and most apps are built on the assumption that the back of a phone is inert. Making the entire surface interactive requires a fundamental rethinking of how software handles accidental input, palm rejection, and basic navigation, none of which Apple appears to be pursuing here.
Designer: Xiaomi
The more useful comparison is the Vivo APEX from 2019, a concept phone that was genuinely all-glass and buttonless without wrapping the display around the chassis. The APEX had no physical buttons, no headphone jack, no visible ports, and shockingly, no front camera. It was definitely a striking object. It also never made it to retail, because striking objects and reliable everyday devices are not always the same thing.
Designer: vivo
What the rumors are actually saying
The picture assembled from various sources is fairly consistent in its broad strokes. The iPhone 20 is expected to arrive with a four-sided bending OLED display that curves around all edges, a fully glass chassis with no metal frame visible from the outside, camera lenses flush against the glass back with no raised rings or seams, and an under-display front camera with Face ID sensors also moved beneath the glass. Physical buttons disappear entirely, replaced by what Apple has internally codenamed “Project Bongo,” localized haptic zones that simulate a press through piezoelectric ceramics rather than a mechanical click.
Images courtesy of: AppleTrack
Apple has been laying this groundwork for years, whether deliberately or not. MagSafe removed the last port most people used regularly. The solid-state home button on the iPhone 7 trained a generation of users to accept a simulated click as the real thing. Touch ID lived in that fake button for years before Face ID made it irrelevant. Project Bongo itself has been in development since 2021, with the haptic button solution reportedly completing functional verification for the iPhone 20 last October. The staged rollout has already begun: under-display Face ID is expected to debut on the iPhone 18 Pro in 2026, a year before the full transformation arrives.
Why Apple might actually want this
The engineering case for an all-glass, buttonless phone is stronger than it might first appear, and it goes well beyond aesthetics. Glass transmits radio frequencies with far less attenuation than metal, which means that a fully glass chassis removes the need for antenna break lines, those small plastic interruptions visible on metal-framed iPhones. For 5G mmWave frequencies, which are particularly vulnerable to obstruction, that is a meaningful structural advantage, not a cosmetic one.
Physical buttons are also apertures, meaning every button cutout is a potential entry point for water, dust, and debris, not to mention a structural point of weakness. Solid-state haptic zones flush with a continuous glass surface create a fully sealed perimeter by default. And without springs, electrical contacts, or moving parts, the mechanical failure modes that eventually wear out every physical button simply do not apply. There is also a software dimension: a haptic surface can be reprogrammed. The same zone that acts as a volume button in one context can behave differently in a camera app, or respond to a half-press the way a DSLR shutter does. That interaction vocabulary does not exist on a physical button.
Images courtesy of: AppleTrack
The design coherence argument is worth taking seriously, too. iOS 26 introduced the Liquid Glass UI at WWDC 2025, with translucent menus, frosted panes, and depth-layered interfaces that read as software built to live inside a glass object. If the hardware catches up, the iPhone 20 would be the first Apple device where the material logic of the shell and the interface are genuinely continuous, rather than one imitating the other.
Why Apple will definitely not do it, at least not yet
The skepticism case is longer and, in several places, harder to argue around. Start with the glass itself. No glass smartphone has survived all kinds of real-world accidents unscathed, including the iPhone 16 Pro Max with Ceramic Shield 2. The current metal frame does real structural work; it absorbs and distributes impact energy in ways that glass cannot. A four-sided curved display that wraps around what used to be the frame zone eliminates that crumple zone entirely.
Thermal management is a less visible but equally serious issue. Aluminum conducts heat significantly better than glass. The metal frame in current iPhones is part of the thermal pathway, moving heat from the logic board outward. Glass is a poor conductor and a poor radiator, and with Apple Intelligence pushing sustained on-device AI inference, the thermal load is growing, not shrinking. Apple would need expanded vapor chambers or novel heat-bridge materials to compensate, none of which have been confirmed.
Then there is the under-display camera. Samsung introduced UDC technology with the Galaxy Z Fold3 in 2021 and used it through the Fold6. Image quality was consistently criticized across all four generations, and Samsung is now reportedly abandoning it for future foldables due to persistent optical and cost challenges. Apple is reportedly moving in the opposite direction, but with a twist. It might use the under-display camera primarily for Face ID’s infrared sensors rather than the selfie camera, which sidesteps the worst degradation but does not resolve long-term selfie quality under glass.
Designer: Samsung
Accessibility is a concern that gets less coverage than drop tests, but it definitely deserves more. Blind and visually impaired users rely on physically locatable controls as navigational anchors, such as the raised profile of a button. Flush haptic zones remove that landmark. There is also the “dead device” recovery problem: a bricked iPhone requires holding a specific physical button combination to enter recovery mode. Whether solid-state haptic buttons can operate at the firmware level, before iOS loads, has not been confirmed. Case and accessory compatibility adds another layer; a wraparound display that curves into what is currently the frame zone fundamentally changes how a protective case grips the device, since the element that used to grip the frame now grips the screen.
The human factor is harder to engineer than the glass
The technology story surrounding the iPhone 20 is genuinely fascinating, and some of it will almost certainly happen. Under-display Face ID on the iPhone 18 Pro is close enough to be treated as confirmed. The full vision, no buttons, no cutouts, glass everywhere, is a different question. Manufacturing challenge is described as “extraordinarily complex,” component manufacturers are on the fence, and the expected price point will likely exceed the current Pro Max tier. Those are not the conditions under which Apple tends to ship a complete reimagining all at once.
But the technical hurdles might not be the hardest part. People have strong, specific feelings about physical buttons in ways they do not always articulate until the buttons are gone. The haptic home button on the iPhone 7 worked well enough that most users stopped noticing it within weeks. Extending that same illusion across every tactile control point on the device, in cold weather, through a case, while the phone is vibrating with an incoming call, and across several years of daily use, is a different challenge than a single button in a fixed location. Whether that feels like liberation or a slow-building frustration might depend less on the engineering and more on the person holding it.
Images courtesy of: AppleTrack
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