Usually the tile stays. Shower glass is a separate assembly from the surround, so Accurate Glass & Mirror treats a swap as a removal and a reinstall rather than a demolition. What complicates it is the old hardware footprint, since existing anchor holes and silicone lines have to be covered, filled or reused by whatever layout replaces them.
A framed unit is held by a perimeter of aluminum, screwed through the tile into anchors and bedded in a continuous line of silicone. A frameless enclosure is held by fewer and larger fixings: hinge plates, clips, a shoe, sometimes a channel down one wall, each carrying real weight into blocking or studs behind the tile.
So the question is never whether glass can be swapped. It is whether the new footprint lands on or over the old one, and that is answered by laying the proposed hardware layout against what is on the wall right now. Photographs settle most of it and a tape held against the existing frame settles the rest, which makes this one of the few glass questions that can be narrowed down before anybody visits.
Frameless plates often land close to where a frame was screwed, and a wall channel run up the hinge side will cover an entire column of old holes at once. Anything left over gets filled with color matched material and sits under trim or behind hardware. From a step back, and certainly from the bathroom door, it disappears.
Getting the old unit off the wall is where damage actually happens. Silicone gets scored and the frame lifted rather than pried, because prying takes the glaze off a tile edge and no filler brings that back. Old sealant is then cut back and the surface cleaned to bare tile, since fresh silicone has to bond to tile and not to a decade of previous caulk.
There are a few. Tile that sounds hollow at the points where anchors need to land, a pan or curb already leaking behind the wall, a substrate that will not hold a fixing, or a layout change such as moving the opening or converting a tub alcove into a shower. In those cases the tile is not the casualty of the glass job, it is the thing that was already failing. A discontinued tile pattern is the opposite situation, and a good reason to design the new hardware around the holes that already exist.
It gets solved with the right anchor instead of with optimism. Hinges can land in a wall channel that spreads the load along the panel, or in fixings rated for the substrate that is actually back there. Where neither works, the layout shifts so hinge points fall on studs. That decision belongs at the template, not on installation day.
Generally yes. The old enclosure normally stays right where it is until the new panels are ready, so the bathroom keeps working in the meantime. A curtain rod is the fallback in the cases where the old unit had to come out early, which is almost always because it was leaking into the wall.
The people who pull your old enclosure are the same ones who template the opening and hang the new panels, which is how old holes get planned around instead of discovered halfway through. Send a photo of what is in there now and we can tell you what the swap involves.
