I've heard a lot of argument about the headphone jack. For my iPad, I bought an apple plug (i don't even know what they call it, is it a lighting port?) to 3.5mm phone jack. Can you explain what that solution doesn't work for everyone? The only thing I can think of is that you can't listen and charge at the same time.
When you have a USB A socket, dongle flash drives are a valid permanent solution.
On a phone's tiny port, storage will stick out very far, snag constantly, and something is probably going to break.
So external storage is just not viable if you're going to be plugging it in for more than a few minutes at a time. And buying more internal storage won't be reasonable until someone puts out a phone where it's "only" twice as expensive as high-end microsd cards. (Right now iPhone storage costs 8x as much, Pixel storage costs 8x as much and requires buying the top model for larger sizes, and Galaxy storage costs 6x as much and requires buying the top model for larger sizes.
Dongles are ugly, inconvenient, flimsy, and they use up the single port on the device. The apple dongle's cable in particular is so thin, I feel like it's about to break every time I use it.
Well, that’s one reason. Another is that sometimes my headphones run out of charge while I’m away from an electric socket and would like to keep listening - a 3.5 mm socket allows me to do that.
The alternative is to use a phone OS that has become so unbearable to me after 13 years of being a loyal user, that I decided to switch to iOS. So yeah, I gave them my money but am reluctantly satisfied with the trade-offs… for now.
Thanks!