Smartphones with ‘self-healing’ displays will arrive within five years, analysts predict
A Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra smartphone.
SeongJoon Cho | Bloomberg via Getty Images
Smartphones with displays capable of repairing themselves could start appearing on the market by 2028, according to analyst firm CCS Insight.
In its roundup of top tech predictions for 2024 and beyond, CCS Insight said that it expects smartphone makers to begin producing phones with “self-healing” displays within five years. The way this could work is by incorporating a “nano coating” on the surface of the display that, if scratched, creates a new material that reacts when exposed to air and fills in the imperfection.
“This is not in the realms of science fiction, it can be done,” Wood told CNBC on a call earlier this week. “I think the biggest challenge with this is setting expectations correctly.”
Companies have been talking about smartphone display technology that can be self-repaired for several years now.
LG, the South Korean consumer electronics giant, was touting self-healing technology in its smartphones as far back as 2013. The company released a smartphone called the G Flex which featured a vertically curved screen and a “self-healing” coating on the back cover. It didn’t explain how exactly the technology worked at the time.
“There’s some new technologies that people are working on right now that looks as though this could become something that people have another go with. We’re not talking about smashed screens miraculously coming back. This is all just little cosmetic scratches,” Wood told CNBC.
A few other phone makers have touted self-healing materials in smartphones. In 2017, Motorola filed a patent for a screen made from a “shape memory polymer” which, when cracked, repairs itself. The idea is that, when heat is applied to the material, it heals over the cracks.
Meanwhile, Apple also previously secured a patent for a folding iPhone with a display cover that would fix itself when damaged.
Still, the technology is yet to be found in a commercially successful handset. And there are a few barriers to launching such phones at a mass scale.
For one, companies require lots of investment in research and development to ensure they can identify new innovations in smartphone screens. Cash is also required to market and sell the phones in big volumes — and ensure consumers are actually properly informed about what level of damage in the phones can be fixed without any manual intervention.
Wood jokingly said he fears that tech tear-down enthusiasts like the popular YouTuber JerryRigsEverything will take a knife to test their self-healing capabilities. This, he says, isn’t the point of self-healing devices. Rather, it’s about technology that can make minimal repairs to the surface of its own accord.
Phone makers are getting more and more inventive when it comes to display technology. At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Motorola released a rollable concept smartphone that extends vertically when pushed upward.
Samsung is pretty far along in the journey toward commercial smartphones with more advanced displays, with its folding Galaxy Z Fold 5 and Z Flip 5 phones now capable of folding hundreds of thousands of times over their lifetime.
HTC could exit VR market by 2026
Separately, CCS Insight also predicted that Taiwanese tech giant HTC will bow out of the virtual reality industry by 2026.
HTC was a pioneer in the smartphone market, responsible for several models which broke the mould in terms of design, performance and functionality. The company’s HTC Hero, HTC Legend, HTC Desire and HTC One were among some of the leading Android phones.
But in 2017, HTC more or less exited the smartphone market and sold its handset business to Google, which has since gone on to aggressively expand its drive into consumer hardware with its Pixel range of devices and Nest smart home products.
HTC has largely staked its future on the merging of virtual and physical worlds. In January, the company launched its Vive XR Elite device, a lightweight headset focused on gaming, fitness and productivity, at a $1,099 price point.
CCS Insight thinks that the firm will quit the VR space due to dwindling revenues and growing competition from Meta, Sony, and, more recently, Apple.
“HTC was one of the pioneers of VR, they’ve done a lot there,” CCS Insight’s Wood said. “But they have kind of struggled to compete, because they haven’t gone for the race to the bottom on price, whereas Meta, with Quest, have been prepared to take very aggressive pricing — almost just above cost pricing — to drive adoption.”
HTC “may get a little bit of an uptick with Apple coming into the space as it’s kind of renewed interest in the category,” Wood continued. “But, ultimately, we think it’s hard for them to stay in it. So we’re predicting that by 2026, they’ll exit the market, and they’ll sell their IP [intellectual property] to some of the other players who are bigger in the space.”
Apple takes control of second-hand market
CCS Insight also predicted that Apple will seek to gain more direct control over the second-hand smartphone market to avoid the growing popularity of second-hand devices denting sales of new iPhones.
Apple may do this by encouraging customers to trade in their phones with the company directly, rather than relying on third-party marketplaces like PCS Wireless; or by incentivizing carriers to give in their old phones to get credits to offset the cost of buying a new iPhone, the firm’s analysts said.
Apple could also start focusing on a “verified” system for grading refurbished iPhones, in order to encourage quality secondhand devices, according to CCS Insight — reinforcing the move in the technology industry toward more “circular” products that can be repaired and resold to avoid electronic waste.
CCS Insight estimates iPhone accounts for around 80% of the organized secondary smartphone market.
A screen showing the price of various cryptocurrencies against the US dollar displayed at a Crypto Panda cryptocurrency store in Hong Kong, China, on Monday, Feb. 3, 2025.
Lam Yik | Bloomberg | Getty Images
The crypto market slid Friday after President Donald Trump unveiled his modified “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries.
The price of bitcoin showed relative strength, hovering at the flat line while ether, XRP and Binance Coin fell 2% each. Overnight, bitcoin dropped to a low of $114,110.73.
The descent triggered a wave of long liquidations, which forces traders to sell their assets at market price to settle their debts, pushing prices lower. Bitcoin saw $172 million in liquidations across centralized exchanges in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGlass, and ether saw $210 million.
Crypto-linked stocks suffered deeper losses. Coinbase led the way, down 15% following its disappointing second-quarter earnings report. Circle fell 4%, Galaxy Digital lost 2%, and ether treasury company Bitmine Immersion was down 8%. Bitcoin proxy MicroStrategy was down by 5%.
Bitcoin falls below $115,000
The stock moves came amid a new wave of risk off sentiment after President Trump issued new tariffs ranging between 10% and 41%, triggering worries about increasing inflation and the Federal Reserve’s ability to cut interest rates. In periods of broad based derisking, crypto tends to get hit as investors pull out of the most speculative and volatile assets. Technical resilience and institutional demand for bitcoin and ether are helping support their prices.
“After running red hot in July, this is a healthy strategic cooldown. Markets aren’t reacting to a crisis, they’re responding to the lack of one,” said Ben Kurland, CEO at crypto research platform DYOR. “With no new macro catalyst on the horizon, capital is rotating out of speculative assets and into safer ground … it’s a calculated pause.”
Crypto is coming off a winning month but could soon hit the brakes amid the new macro uncertainty, and in a month usually characterized by lower trading volumes and increased volatility. Bitcoin gained 8% in July, according to Coin Metrics, while ether surged more than 49%.
Ether ETFs saw more than $5 billion in inflows in July alone (with just a single day of outflows of $1.8 million on July 2), bringing it’s total cumulative inflows to $9.64 to date. Bitcoin ETFs saw $114 million in outflows in the final trading session of July, bringing its monthly inflows to about $6 billion out of a cumulative $55 billion.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai gestures to the crowd during Google’s annual I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, on May 20, 2025.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google has purged more than 50 organizations related to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, from a list of organizations that the tech company provides funding to, according to a new report.
The company has removed a total of 214 groups from its funding list while adding 101, according to a new report from tech watchdog organization The Tech Transparency Project. The watchdog group cites the most recent public list of organizations that receive the most substantial contributions from Google’s U.S. Government Affairs and Public Policy team.
The largest category of purged groups were DEI-related, with a total of 58 groups removed from Google’s funding list, TTP found. The dropped groups had mission statements that included the words “diversity, “equity,” “inclusion,” or “race,” “activism,” and “women.” Those are also terms the Trump administration officials have reportedly told federal agencies to limit or avoid.
In response to the report, Google spokesperson José Castañeda told CNBC that the list reflects contributions made in 2024 and that it does not reflect all contributions made by other teams within the company.
“We contribute to hundreds of groups from across the political spectrum that advocate for pro-innovation policies, and those groups change from year to year based on where our contributions will have the most impact,” Castañeda said in an email.
Organizations that were removed from Google’s list include the African American Community Service Agency, which seeks to “empower all Black and historically excluded communities”; the Latino Leadership Alliance, which is dedicated to “race equity affecting the Latino community”; and Enroot, which creates out-of-school experiences for immigrant kids.
The organization funding purge is the latest to come as Google began backtracking some of its commitments to DEI over the last couple of years. That pull back came due to cost cutting to prioritize investments into artificial intelligence technology as well as the changing political and legal landscape amid increasing national anti-DEI policies.
Over the past decade, Silicon Valley and other industries used DEI programs to root out bias in hiring, promote fairness in the workplace and advance the careers of women and people of color — demographics that have historically been overlooked in the workplace.
However, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision to end affirmative action at colleges led to additional backlash against DEI programs in conservative circles.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order upon taking office in January to end the government’s DEI programs and directed federal agencies to combat what the administration considers “illegal” private-sector DEI mandates, policies and programs. Shortly after, Google’s Chief People Officer Fiona Cicconi told employees that the company would end DEI-related hiring “aspirational goals” due to new federal requirements and Google’s categorization as a federal contractor.
Despite DEI becoming such a divisive term, many companies are continuing the work but using different language or rolling the efforts under less-charged terminology, like “learning” or “hiring.”
Even Google CEO Sundar Pichai maintained the importance diversity plays in its workforce at an all-hands meeting in March.
“We’re a global company, we have users around the world, and we think the best way to serve them well is by having a workforce that represents that diversity,” Pichai said at the time.
One of the groups dropped from Google’s contributions list is the National Network to End Domestic Violence, which provides training, assistance, and public awareness campaigns on the issue of violence against women, the TTP report found. The group had been on Google’s list of funded organizations for at least nine years and continues to name the company as one of its corporate partners.
Google said it still gave $75,000 to the National Network to End Domestic Violence in 2024 but did not say why the group was removed from the public contributions list.
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