So... there is a 4" Android phone out there. It's widely available, and from a major manufacturer. It's very usable, and it runs mostly stock Android. I have it, and I like it very much. Brace yourself for the reveal because you're not going to like it.
It's a foldable. It's the Motorola Razr+ or Razr Ultra (I have the 2025 Ultra). The outer screen is 4" and you can use it for almost everything you want to do. I use the outer screen probably 80+% of the time, since I prefer small phones. Every once in a while you run into an app or website that just wasn't built to function on a 4" display, but for almost everything I've tried it works great. You can then also un-fold it into a full-size 7" phablet when you need to do high-detail stuff like Maps.
There are downsides: it's expensive; it's a foldable, so reliability is a concern; and Motorola's OS support promise is not great at only like 3-4 years. But if you're willing to make those compromises, you can get a genuinely very good, small phone, right now today.
Once you get over the shock of having a foldable suggested to you (I was initially skeptical, too), give it a look. It's really genuinely a nice phone for small-phone-likers.
I just signed up on their site and got a mail with the following info:
"To catch you up:
We’ve been hard at work over the summer building out a team and searching the globe for a manufacturer to build our dream phone. It’s been a slow process, but we’re nearing completion and expect to be able to kick off this project very soon.
Once we have a manufacturer locked in, we will be reaching out with a full update on the project and our plan to move forward."
It's a foldable. It's the Motorola Razr+ or Razr Ultra (I have the 2025 Ultra). The outer screen is 4" and you can use it for almost everything you want to do. I use the outer screen probably 80+% of the time, since I prefer small phones. Every once in a while you run into an app or website that just wasn't built to function on a 4" display, but for almost everything I've tried it works great. You can then also un-fold it into a full-size 7" phablet when you need to do high-detail stuff like Maps.
There are downsides: it's expensive; it's a foldable, so reliability is a concern; and Motorola's OS support promise is not great at only like 3-4 years. But if you're willing to make those compromises, you can get a genuinely very good, small phone, right now today.
Once you get over the shock of having a foldable suggested to you (I was initially skeptical, too), give it a look. It's really genuinely a nice phone for small-phone-likers.