There is. Dropping your phone follows a curve, it falling from 16,000ft it does not. There are more forces at play when you fumble your phone. They aren't necessarily stronger forces though...just more of them. Trajectory and spinning add different forces on top of gravity. There is also the catch attempt that invariably forces the phone down harder and changes the trajectory.

Yeah. I’ve dropped my phone though rarely hard. A few months ago I was hiking with the phone in my pocket and some sort of impact (there was a lot of scrambling over rock) caved in the phone from the back through the case and completely destroyed it.

Guess they chose a different feat then. Or took the +2 ability bump instead of a feat.

I drop my iPhone 12 mini on the daily onto marble floor, asphalt and concrete .. sometimes it flings out of my hands with an arc to it. Slippery little thing, it is.

Only the edges are a bit scratched up.

That's just some luck.

I recently dropped mine by tagging by earphone wire and it landed on the top corner with a spectacular bang and cracked the whole screen.

Though it's the second phone I drop with consequences, after Ericsson A1018s.

Other people usually aren't that lucky.