Android

Open bootloaders, ir blaster, 3.5mm jack, sd card slot, replaceable batteries. The list goes on.

The physical fingerprint reader on the back of the phone.

This thread is just a reminder of how terrible phones have become.

Strangely it's usually only the cheap phones that include these premium features.

Every damn feature.

But most? Removable flipping batteries. Having a bomb in your pocket computer that you can't remove, and shortens it's effective life without often complex surgery is absolutely criminal.

Removable D batteries have existed since 1898. It was a staples feature of machines. Nobody wanted, needed, or desired the tech brah "disruption" of gluing lithium bombs into phones.

The smaller size phones (I hate these Phablets,) 3.5mm jack and back finger print reader, (although my Pixel 4a5G has them, it will be the last,) replaceable batteries, and selfie camera that doesn't take up screen real estate.

I liked the notification LEDs that some of the nexus phones used to have, you could customize the color / flashing pattern per contact.

Fuck, the freedom. Root & custom ROM, running your damn device that you paid money for the way you want to. Imagine that. I stopped after rooting your phone killed Snapchat (because 3 idiots use Snap Pay or whatever), killed your tap pay wallet, killed Pokémon Go, etc etc etc. Then they tried telling people oh bro, just hide your root bro Majisk hide root. Like I need one more thing to do. 🙄 If I need to hide it, and most of the benefits of rooting have gone away/are incorporated into smartphones & no longer needed...I'm just going to stop rooting.

Then the microSD card expansion slot. Some try to say it's for waterproofing purposes, but they can use the same pop-out slot as the SIM card & it's nbd. Others say it's because the storage can sometimes be "unstable" & glitch, but over the years I've only had problems twice: just once with a Samsung, and then constantly with a shitty Motorola smartphone but that's on me because I bought a shitty Motorola smartphone. I think they killed it just because they could, because everybody else was killing it off & they knew they were going to get your money regardless. And then either pay a premium for extra on-board storage, or pay $10/mo for the rest of your life for "cloud" storage. Or both! Money, money, money, it's all about the money.

These guys got rid of everything that made an Android an Android, and if I've got problems with mid-tier phones, to spend $1K+ on a flagship Android. For crying out loud, I'm not spending $1K on an Android that doesn't even have microSD expansion, at that point you might as well buy an iPhone.

Audio jack 3.5mm!!! I'm sick of buying USBC to audio jack adaptors! Just add a damn audio jack! IR for remote control.

I'd forgotten all about the notification LED. I wonder, could you flash a small part of an OLED display to achieve something similar while still being low power?

At this time, the 3.5mm jack is top with 27%

I really wish IR blasters would come back into style. They're not even expensive to manufacture, and they're small enough that they can be incorporated into any modern smartphone design pretty easily. And almost everybody with a smartphone has SOMETHING in their home that they control with an IR remote. There's basically no reason to have stopped including them.

Everybody misses their IR blaster it seems. And why not? randomly turning off the neighbors TV is good wholesome fun.

Restriction of Network access per app

My first phone could play terrestrial radio. I miss that.

Built in IR blaster

Open Bootloaders, 3.5mm jacks, SD Card readers.

Openness

A keyboard.

Software festure, but I miss being able to turn on and off wifi and Bluetooth in the drop-down menu with one click. Latest android replaced it with another sub menu to select network or device, requiring another action to enable/disable.

mass storage mode

Notification led that is separate from the display. Custom per-app colour and blink pattern.

Removable battery is #1. My old Galaxy S3 (not even my first phone-yes I'm old) has absolutely godawful battery life but I had I think 4 total batteries around to make sure I could always have it even on a heavy use day. That sucked, but at least it was doable with a really easy process (peel off plastic back, pull out and swap battery, snap the backplate back on).

I keep an old phone around and sometimes use it to play like a video for my cats to watch if they're laying on my bed when I'm not in there. But it has to stay plugged in because it loses the first 20% in about 15 minutes.

And that phone in particular (a pixel 2) is particularly a pain to replace the battery in the first place.

I had a Google pixel 3a which had squeeze sensors, with lineageOS I had it assigned to my flashlight which was super handy. Also I enjoyed the heart-rate sensor on my GS5. Also really liked the DAC in my LGV20.

Screens without holes in them.

I'm a Xperia weirdo because the one I have still rocks a 3.5mm jack, expandable storage and a camera outside the screen. Not only are some of those gone from this year's equivalent, but it is 1500 bucks now, which is absurd. I went to a phone search engine and looked up that exact feature set and it turns out there are exactly zero phones that include those now.

I genuinely don't understand why people think the way to compete with Samsung is doing a worse version of their exact product. It's so dumb. Or maybe it's true and it's the people who are dumb. Because everybody says these things, but people seem to buy candybars with puncholes and no physical headphne support or expandable storage or IR blasters.

3 way tie between 3.5mm jack, easily removable, and now that microSD Express is finally becoming mainstream, a microSD Express card slot. It'd be nice to see in a flagship or at least a Mediatek mid range chip like the dimensity 8400

I know they dont all remove it, but man audio jack phones were awesome. My usbc adapter sucks and bluetooth is spotty and low res.

I miss controlling the volume on a per app basis. It gets unwieldy, but it was nice sometimes.