[pdoege]

Yes, there are lots.

Largest of which is that the manufacturers have to balance onerous return penalties vs. weight and size.

The solution is to use a monocoque and glue everything down.

Thus, consumers buy the cheapest plans, carriers push the costs onto the manufacturers, manufacturers push the costs back to the consumer for repairs, ad infinitum.

There are phones with user replaceable batteries available. They aren't great sellers. Until consumers vote with their wallets or regulations the dynamic will not change.

[toast0]

> There are phones with user replaceable batteries available. They aren't great sellers.

It's hard to vote with my wallet on replacable batteries because I already have to vote on other issues. In today's market my priorities are 3-4GB of ram (which is insane, but that's what it takes to prevent my launcher from swapping out, and it's really frustrating when it's swapped out), 3.5mm headphone jack, and usb-c. Once you have those three things, I would prefer a removable battery, but whatever. Also, apparently you need to specify decent vibration, because motorola doesn't have it.

[chaosharmonic]

This. Mine are: display output, bootloader unlock, waterproofing. And that's maybe three good, current phones at any given time.

Also, while a headphone jack would be great, once kernel-level support for ADC v3 is smoothed out (4.19 is the first LTS to have this, and has only started showing up on Android devices this year) my real dream is two USB ports.

[jhasse]

LG G5 has all those things (4 GB RAM, USB-C, headphone jack, user-replaceable battery).

[toast0]

Hmmm, released in 2016 though? A good choice for then (that I missed), but a 4 year old Android seems like a poor choice for today.

[jhasse]

Has official LineageOS support so it runs Android 10: https://download.lineageos.org/h850

Or do you want to avoid a 4 year old Android phone because of performance?

[Reason077]

Batteries also seem to be getting better in recent years, which reduces the need for them to be easily replaceable.

With previous generations of iPhone, my battery was usually pretty much toast after 2 years of use. Greatly reduced battery life, random shutdowns at low battery charge, and in one case even swelling which pushed apart the phone's case.

But I've had my current phone, an iPhone X, for almost 3 years now (since November 2017). The battery hardly seems to have degraded at all despite intensive use and daily charging. Battery status reports it still has 91% of original capacity, and that hasn't changed for a while.