Anon notices what they've taken from us

Next will be memory. They will say everything you meed should be stored online for a subscription fee.

They'll take away volume control (SW/HW buttons) and replace with dynamically adjusting "magic volume" so that you can't mute ads.

Don't forget the RGB notification led!

I switched to Chinese brand phones, they still have all this and they're dirt cheap, currently rocking an Ulephone power armor 18t, which also has a flir infrared camera and a microscope for some reason. No I'm not joking, they work surprisingly well and have come in handy more than I thought they would!

At least removable batteries will be mandatory in EU by 2027.

This goddamn camera built into my screen instead of above the screen pisses me off so fucking much. So often I have to move a picture down to read the top of it.

IT'S BLOCKING MY MEMES GOD FUCKING DAMMIT MY MEMES

THEY TOOK MY SLIDE OUT QWERTY KEYBOARD!

They removed my slide out keyboard, too.

The IR blaster needs to come back. They were mostly on phones pre-smart device where they had super limited usage. With a smart device, they could practically do anything. I wanna use my phone as a universal remote, damn it.

I want a 0hysical.keyboadd too. Touch screen sucks.

I still have an S9 with a notification LED.

From my cold, dead hands.

Smartphone manufacturers, if you're reading this:

I spent 6 hours on google to find a phone with a screen smaller than 6 inch. I did find none (except an old iPhone, but I want android), so I had to buy one 6 inch. It is too unwieldy. I am annoyed.

There is a serious market for people like me. Do not look away. Somebody will buy these phones.

Also, by the way, it's not bad if the phones are a bit thicker.

Do many people know that there is actually a patent for the idea of an advertisement that plays to a certain point... and then does not end, will not let you skip it, until you as the user, via a camera and microphone, can be verified to have assumed a pose, made a facial expression, and/or said a specific phrase?

The actual patent shows a smart tv 'owner' standing up and saying McDonalds! in order to like keep watching Netflix.

We quite literally have the tech and the legal framework for 'Drink Verification Mountain Dew Can' to actually be a thing.

I love it when uninformed troglodytes complain about a hole in the screen. They didn't add a hold in the screen. The hole was already there. They just wrapped your screen around it for more screen. 😅

The day I can't find a phone that has an headphone jack is the day I go feral and become a hermit in the woods.

You know what else they've taken from us? Actually unique designs for phones. When I look at modern day smartphones, for some reason they look like clones of each other. Where's all the spunk that these manufacturers used to put in their devices?

Fuck you, minimalism. Ever since you've ruined my iPhone back in 2013, my life has never been the same.

Physical keyboard? Notification LED?

Give me back my goddamed physical keyboard

I still remember the extended conversation I had with the cell phone man on the day I realized that time had moved on, and it wasn't even possible for me to buy a third-party phone that still had a keyboard and then hook it up to their network anymore. I was just going to have to poke haplessly at the glass and get letters wrong for the rest of my life.

IT'S MY MONEY, LET ME BUY THE KIND OF PHONE I WANT

For me it's the small size. They are so big now I can't fit them in my pocket or use them with one hand.

I miss the FM radio

Who doesn't use all the cameras on their phone? Is there like a specific focal length you never use? Or are you unaware that zooming in the camera app switches lenses?

I feel like this is just a ploy, by the phone company, to figure out what they should deprive us of next.

Stop giving them ideas!!!

that's what happens when a product is designed only for 95% of people.

Here's my take on what phone companies will do next: replaceable batteries are back! With an inkjet twist:

1- You have to buy them precharged

2- You can no longer recharge them

3- The phone will explode if it detects a 3rd party battery

They removed many useful features that benefited users but spyware only increases

They took the fingerprint scanner out and put a really bad one behind the screen...

Three years ago I predicted Apple would remove wifi from phones and call it a feature.

So far, I was wrong. Thank fuck.

DRM Battery, you can only refill it the X amount of times that is paid for. Don't worry you can have it serviced for an exorborant fee, that will become another subscription.

I bought a Sony Xperia 1 V mostly because of this. No hole on the screen, it has a 3.5mm jack and tooless access to its SD/Sim card tray

*laughs in Fairphone 3

we need to make open source wireless communications infrastructure.

how?

idk the FCC is the major block as long as it's funded by telecom

genuinely dont understand the logic behind having that many cameras. Surely it would just be better to have a singular better sensor, and some additional hardware for it?

Current smartphones are just vehicles to harvest people’s data. I hate the current smartphone market.

Man i used my samsung galaxy whatever's IR blaster SO MUCH and I miss the fuck out of trolling my friends by turning their shit on and off

No screen. Just AI conversation.

Profit motive is the enemy of quality.

In a utopia, everything's designed for compatibility and longevity.

A sixth camera is the obvious answer

All I want is no front camera, single rear camera and no glue to get to battery.

They'll fucking sell the phone and box separately

I am never buying an expensive Smartphone again. Just something that works for emergency calls and 2FA and lets me buy a ticket for public transport. I am not gaming on it, I rarely listen to music with it, I only have about 6 apps on it in total. Give me a long lasting battery and let me replace it. The only thing that I need is a big screen, because I am handicapped and have bad eyesight and it is easier to see and use the software if it isn't too small, otherwise I would prefer a smaller size and I give a f*ck how slim or thick the phone is or how water proof, non of my phones ever got even a tiny bit wet. In the 7 years I own my current phone I have taken about 50 pictures and 48 got deleted shortly after. I also do not need a lot of storage.

While I do miss those things, my S23 Ultra takes fucking amazing pictures.

Next is making one phone with all the bells and whistles and locking them behind subscriptions

You can still remove the micro sd, it's just hidden now.

Unstoppable full screen ads you have to watch before you can answer a call or view a text on your own phone

I must be a fkn weirdo because I just don't care about any of these things.

Replaceable battery is an exception - but that's coming back anyway.

I don't have any devices that use infra red

I don't need a microsd because the on board memory is so much I don't even have to think about capacity any more

I much prefer bluetooth

I much prefer a larger screen instead of buttons.

They didn't really cut a hole in my screen, they expanded my screen around my front facing camera. You can disable that expanded portion of the screen on most phones ?

I use the rear camera on my phone all. the. time.

I hate both phone types horribly. On screen keyboards are complete trash. Not only did Android take the SD Card, but even if you happen to have a manufacturer who still includes it Google has made it horribly inconvenient to use so you buy their shitty cloud storage that loses people's data. Among many other issues.

The EU is mandating easily replaceable batteries from 2027.

Dey took 'er jerbs!!

They killed his dawg

They ...

Subscription to the camera on your own phone, capped # of photos per week and only basic adjustment/editing features for the entry tier.

Most of these gripes are solved by simply not buying the flagship and instead purchasing the $200 unlocked version.

Now the battery, that's the one that pisses me off the most. But at this point we've been doing it for 10 years.

User serviceability is intentionally not a focal point especially when it comes to anything a person has to use day to day. Any kind of tool or appliance- and especially electronic devices, forget about it. Luckily there are off the beaten path companies like framework and fairphone, but these are hard to market to regular joes and some are unavailable in a lot of regions.

Tech enthusiasts like presumably a lot of this comment section is are lucky there's at least something out there.

Making them increasingly difficult to hold ("but design!" They cry) so you "accidently" have to buy a new one again.

If you want the good camera, you need to get the giant version of the phone.

If you want a phone that fits in human hands, you can only choose from subpar cameras.

One must recognize that if those changes were truly not popular they would not have stuck.

1. If this hasn't been done already, being able to unlock the bootloader
2. Adding "AI" integrated into the OS with vague benefits even though the processing is done on the cloud (like Windows) just so the OEM can spy on you better
3. Forced volume limiters: The phone won't let you stay at max volume for more than 5 minutes a day, even if connected to a BT device set at substantially under max volume
4. Making it take more clicks to disable Internet, Bluetooth, other connected features
5. DRM built into Android itself
6. Being able to sideload
7. Ads within the OS

All of these are already on their way to being implemented:

1. Already the case with the vast majority of phones
2. Pixels already have this. Samsung is focusing on this in 2024. Several Chinese OEMs already have some version of this.
3. This was an idea Google attempted to implement in Android 14. Seems like it didn't go through that year, but there's always this year.
4. Google already made it harder to do this in Android 12. Apple also does this with the toggles only disabling WiFi/BT until tomorrow. Other OEMs are good for now.
5. After widespread disdain for Google's Web Environment Integrity BS, Google is quietly pivoting to this stupid change.
6. Google is now making it harder to do this on all Android phones. Now, you can only sideload apps targeting an Android version at most 8 behind the current one. This disables lots of little FOSS projects that were light on system resources.
7. Most Chinese OEMs already do this, although you can usually turn it off. Samsung used to do this, but backpedaled. Also bloatware exists.

80 cameras and nothing to do and no where to go

The only things I need from my phone are:

• Modem
• Taxi apps
• Forced upon 2FA SMS codes

Anyone who provides me with an alternative can just take my entire phone, fuck it.

They played us. They ducking played us.

I don't use the ultra wide camera but I absolutely use the telephoto camera

One of these years the next craze will be a mobile phone with no or only forward facing cameras.

Second 8" screen.

My phone has two cameras. I hardly use 1.

I don't understand why everyone hates the notch, or especially the hole punch camera now. You could just disable the pixels next to the notch going back to a regular screen, and if you don't it's only extra screen space. Even more so with the hole punch. Why more screen bad?

Maybe their just trying to get you to spend more time with your family and friends?

I use all four cameras. (one is a sensor)

They also remove the tv receiver on higher end phones, but my bet is that they will remove custom launcher support.

They're going to make the experience "better" by forcing you to talk to their AI to get anything done.

Walking around with new phone: "How do I turn on the flashlight? There no flashlight button in the pulldown menu anymore... OK Google how do I turn on the flashlight?"

"To turn the flashlight on or off you have to say, 'OK Google, turn on the flashlight' or 'OK Google, turn off the flashlight.'"

It'll start with small things but eventually they'll want to stop paying developers to add GUIs so they'll just force us all to use the AI.

What's next? Pay per text/call. Soon your mobile plan will just be a bill for hardware and any communications will come with a large fee. I picture it like virgin mobile prepaid was back in the early 00's with 10¢/text & 25¢/minute on voice.

While I'm all about options because everyone has different use cases, I've found that over the years as these features have been removed, I haven't really missed them

They also gave us those things before they took them away.

Remember: you're beholden to the whims of capitalism until it's gone.

They removed 3 ways water could get inside the phone

People don't care. They buy whatever marketing tells them to buy. Lines around the block for the first iPhone when it was vastly inferior to the other phones of the day. Couldn't even use custom ringtones. Knew then that people really are sheep.

Who even used IR?

"Cut a hole in your screen"

So we still don't grasp how this works, huh?

Phone nerds are such losers.

Who tf used an IR blaster? And what sane person misses the flimsy plastic back on phones with removable batteries? They didn't cut a hole in your screen, they removed a half inch of dead useless space at the top and bottom and gave you more usable real estate while also cranking the resolution and refresh rate to 11. Buttons? WHAT BUTTONS EXACTLY? The single enormous one that ate up nearly 25% of the phone and all it did was GO BACK?! And don't even mention the cameras. Your five cameras you didn't ask for are why you can film yourself in 4K doing whatever brain dead tiktok fad you saw on your enormous HD screen, and why you can pretend you had front row seats to a concert you sat in the nosebleeds for.

Headphone jack is fair, no argument. I use Bluetooth headphones but I get the rationale. Everything else is stupid.