Gone but not forgotten: Survey reveals Android users miss these features the most

Our smartphones have undergone profound commodification. But in the process of forging them into objects we use and rely on for nearly every waking hour, phone companies have focused a lot on optimizing utility, which, in turn, has resulted in many key features being dropped from our beloved devices. These days, leading brands especially insist on slimming down phones more, even going against what users may truly want.

So, to get a sense of which features our readers miss the most, we recently asked you which features among those abandoned by phone companies you miss the most. Thanks to those of you who participated and shared their views, we know we aren’t alone in missing these features that were once fundamental elements of our smartphones but are now rare.

Which abandoned Android phone features do you miss the most?

More than 4,000 of you voted and told us which phone features you ache over the most. While we don’t have a clear winner from the survey, our results convey that an almost equal number of people long for two key features. The 3.5mm headphone jack and the easy-to-replace battery were at the top of our results, receiving roughly 27% and 25% votes, respectively.

We weren’t surprised by the top choices, though the results were more tangled than we had anticipated initially. Right behind the top two choices were expandable storage and notification LEDs from older Android devices. This was obvious, too, since over the years, larger and significantly faster internal storage options have eliminated the need for hot-swappable SD cards, but they haven’t replaced the latter’s ease of transferring data from one device to another. And while brands like Nothing have tried to reinvent the OG notification LED with modern solutions like light strips or dot-matrix interfaces, they haven’t quite been able to recreate the charm and unobstrusiveness of the tiny multi-colored LED.

Meanwhile, fewer people said they missed the IR blaster, probably because some phones, such as the OnePlus 13, still offer it. Meanwhile, the FM radio is missed, but by only a small fraction.

Some of our readers also suggested features that we initially did not account for, such as dual front-facing speakers or the squeeze gestures from the Pixel 3, the Soli RADAR for face unlock on the Pixel 4, and physical rear fingerprint scanners on devices. A few comments also rekindled memories from the days when modding Android devices with custom ROMs and kernels was popular.

However, one reader left a very profound note on the nature of the phone market. Kamil Devonish speaks for many of us when they say the market now delivers very similar devices.

Many of our commenters also noted that they miss more than a single feature, and I concur. But if I were to revive one feature, it would be the headphone jack. I miss the ease of plugging out from one device and into another in a second, without the arduous process of having to pair or unpair — while facing the limits in terms of devices we can connect to at once.

Above all, I miss sitting with a close friend or a loved one and sharing one of the two earpieces with them while listening to the same soundtracks or music. Even though we can replicate it with wireless earbuds too, the lack of wires has allowed us to be reserved to our own personal spaces and grow distant as human beings. In this transition, we have started focusing more on the utility of technology while ignoring the emotions these channels led to.