7 Discontinued Smartphone Features We Want Back (And 7 That Can Stay Gone)

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Grizzled old tech veterans who got started in computing on Amstrad CPC64, lived through the era of “640K is enough RAM for anyone”, and had mobile phones by the time we were 16 … we’ve seen it all come and go, and then come back again. We’ve lived through the endless hype cycles, the next big things, and even the one-more-things. We’ve seen smartphone features come, and we’ve seen them go, sometimes forever (at least so far).

In this article, we’ll run through two types of features that have disappeared: ones we want to see come back, and ones we can definitely live without. Of course, this list is entirely subjective, and we make no apologies for it. The nature of smartphones is that they’re such an intimate device that it’s easy to grow attached to certain features — and easy to get really angry when they’re taken away. Regardless of how we feel about them, most are still available if you look hard enough and are willing to limit your options.

Whether it’s for extra juice when you’re on the go or just easily servicing a degraded battery, the single biggest loss in modern smartphone design has to be the removable battery. Sure, it tended to mean a tacky plastic cover on the back, but was that really such a burden?

There is one major benefit of non-removable batteries: waterproofing. By enclosing everything, gluing it shut, and removing user serviceability, modern phones are more likely to survive the random mishap involving a dumped cup of coffee … or a toilet.

There are still a few Android models with swappable batteries in 2026, though you might not recognize any of the brand names on that list. Fairphone is the most notable, founded in 2013 with the laudable goal of creating a more ethical smartphone through every stage of production. With a five-year warranty on some models, promised updates for eight years, and a variety of supported OSes, Fairphone seems poised for longevity in this area. 

After the near-indestructible Nokia brick phones came a brief but memorable period of diminutive flip phones, for the very real reason that the Nokias were far too large and unwieldy. Also, you could make a satisfyingly dramatic snap as you finished your conversation. But that’s just not the case anymore. Modern smartphones are already thin, light, and easy enough to carry in your pocket, even though they have much larger screens. 

Flip phones do still exist, often with dual screens, but they’re mostly a nostalgic novelty, not a generation-defining design feature. Samsung is keeping the dream alive with the Galaxy Z Flip (around $350 on Amazon). Unlike the flip phones of the early 2000s, the Z Flip uses the unique clamshell design to act as a tripod for selfies or a fun handheld camcorder, and features a secondary front screen to display widgets and health tracking data. That’s a far cry from the old push-button Motorolas, huh?

Look, we love our AirPods as much as the next person, but there’s no denying the simple beauty and audio quality of a 3.5-millimeter headphone jack, especially if you need to do something more complex like plugging into high-end audio gear at a party. Not to mention that most smartphones let you plug a microphone input to that port, too, for high-quality vocals in your latest livestreamed masterpiece. Apple was the first to make the bold move of removing the headphone port, which was ruthlessly mocked by Samsung, and then, embarrassingly, copied. 

Was it really so they could shave a precious 0.1 millimeter off the thickness of the phone, or was it a more sinister planned obsolescence for millions of good headphones that never really broke, combined with the industry desire to sell more Bluetooth accessories with limited lifespan? Apple sold 80 million AirPods last year. At upwards of $100 a pop, that’s … a lot of money. Luckily, you can grab a USB-C to audio jack adapter cable for less than $10 on Amazon, so it’s not a huge loss, as long as you’re happy living in dongle hell. 

The Apple iPhone leads the way when it comes to face-scanning technology, using a combination of tiny laser dots and an infrared camera to accurately map a 3D model of the user’s face. Face ID is simpler to use because it’s effectively invisible when it works, and it can be more secure than fingerprint scanning. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for Android. 

With only a handful of notable exceptions, nearly all Androids only use a standard optical camera to visually scan your face. That means they’re not building a depth map or 3D model of your facial structure (they’re just comparing a flat 2D image), so they can be easily defeated by a printed photograph or decent mask. If you’re an Android user, you should probably stick to the fingerprint scanner and disable face unlock completely. Even a PIN code can be more secure than face unlock. 

Apple AirDrop and Google Quick Share are great for sharing files when they actually work, but they need a perfect set of conditions to work reliably. Specifically, they rely on solid Bluetooth and access to the same Wi-Fi network by both sending and receiving devices. Even then, they’re hopeless for really large files. Sometimes you just want to pop some files on a small piece of plastic and hand it over to a friend. The sneakernet — so called because you’d have to walk it over to your destination — involves transferring data using physical media like a burnt CD or USB thumb drive, and it’s almost always reliable. Or perhaps you just wanted masses of storage for some movies on the go. That’s where a microSD slot came in handy, even if it was often hidden underneath the battery.

There are still a few niche phone models with a microSD slot, including some from Samsung and Motorola devices, but they started being removed from most Androids back in 2015. The Fairphone is once again a current option in this case.

Back in the days when everything had a remote control, having an all-in-one unit in your pocket could be handy. But let’s face it: it was mostly a neat party trick to use in a bar if the TV was too loud or your team was being utterly humiliated. In the real world, IR blaster functionality saw little actual use, and companies soon started removing the technology based on usage metrics. 

While a lot of new gadgets still support infrared controllers, there are other technologies available that also enable other modes of control. If something does have a wireless remote, it’s more likely to be Bluetooth, or you might need a smartphone app to control it instead. While the idea of a universal remote still has appeal, voice assistants have swallowed up that role.  That’s not to say the feature is completely dead, though. Generally, smartphones for the Asian market have retained it. The OnePlus 15 is a great flagship that’ll still let you control all your retro gear. 

You might think your fancy 5G is good enough to stream 4K multimedia anywhere in the world, but that’s not the case in many rural locations. Even 4G can be patchy, and if you do find a bar of elusive 5G, it’s often of such bad quality that you’ll end up Googling how to disable 5G.

The humble FM radio was never subject to streaming limitations or network speeds, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that’s exactly why the data network providers want to get rid of it. Aside from nudging consumers to pay for streaming music services, removing FM radio makes the phone-manufacturing process easier since those receivers have to be tuned separately for each country where a particular device is sold. The writing seems to be on the wall for FM transmissions in a broader sense, too. Norway was the first country to completely shut off FM broadcasts, at the end of 2017. Most other countries are planning to turn it off along with over-the-air TV in the next decade. The future is data, and we’ll be dragged kicking and screaming into it.

Believe it or not, we used to have to type out entire text messages using only a 10-digit number keypad. It felt like an Olympic sport, tapping away at the same number to access multiple other letters. Then we added actual keyboards — famously on the Blackberry — often sliding out from under the phone. For a while, life was good. Then along came the touchscreen, and when you could magic up a virtual keyboard on demand, a physical one felt like a decadent novelty. So, no, we don’t need to go back to bulky physical keyboards as a design quirk, and you can even still find a few models floating around with this feature. Besides, for the really hardcore, Bluetooth connectivity means you could technically whip out an actual full-size wireless keyboard, as long as you can stand the funny looks. 

Aside from keyboards, older phones often came with other physical buttons, too: volume, power, and a mute switch. That’s all we really need, and some of them remain on most phones. Sadly, though, Apple replaced the slider with a customizable Action button on the iPhone a few years back. It can only be set to a few functions, though, all of which are otherwise easily accessible within a click or two from the homescreen. And if you want to use it to silence your device, you can’t check the status without opening your phone.

We don’t need more buttons; we need smarter, less cluttered interfaces. The shortcuts to camera and flashlight from the homescreen are the best example of this, followed closely by pull-down control and shortcut buttons. But we do need that mute switch back, please.

Always-on displays have largely killed off the LED notification, which could often be customized to show different colors depending on the source. The new models give you instant access to your notifications and the time, but they’re also terrible for battery life (we know, right — who could have foreseen that?) Laboratory testing showed that using an always-on display resulted in a third to a quarter of the standby time you’d get without it, while more day-to-day usage results in around 5-10% less battery life.

Thankfully, it’s usually easy to turn off the always-on display. For those who want a retro feel with modern specifications, for example, the Nothing Phone (3) uses a small LED matrix for notifications. For actual LED notifications, phones like the Unihertz Jelly Max ($320 on Amazon) sometimes have multiple RGB LEDs. However, they can only be customized in a few limited ways for system functions, rather than different colors for specific apps. 

Designing for a million different device formats is hard enough. Having to also accommodate a large chunk of dead space on either side of your app could drive a developer to desperate measures. When Samsung first introduced the curved Edge display, users often reported accidentally touching UI elements they didn’t mean to, and soon, there was an app to prevent unintentional touching of your Edge screen. Samsung finally discontinued the feature with the S24. 

Of course, we’re only talking about the display here; after all, phones go in a perpetual design cycle of flat and curved edges. That’s so buyers can know at a glance who has the old model, and feel a little superior about their latest $1000 purchase.

Screens that curve around the edge were just one side of the extreme, though. The other was phones with a massive body and tiny screen — maybe half an inch of dead space for the screen bezels. Ultimately, all we want is a display that fills the device, not one that spills over the edge.

Another victim of the ever slimmer smartphone was the flush camera. The laws of physics apparently put a hard stop on the optics at some point, and instead, manufacturers were forced to make a camera bump where the lens protrudes. But it doesn’t sound as impressive on paper, so the cameras were excluded from measurements for marketing purposes. When you take into account the bump, it more than doubles the stated thickness of the iPhone 17 Air from 5.64mm to 11.32mm. 

That’s not to say smartphone camera technology didn’t keep pace with other improvements. In good light, some modern smartphones can approach the photo quality of a full-size DSLR camera. After all, we’ve seen entire movies shot on an iPhone. So here’s a radical idea: let’s just make smartphones thicker again. The camera won’t need to stick out — and we can finally get swappable batteries back.

The dream of a modular phone never dies, but it remains just that. To be clear, we haven’t classified this as a design trend that can stay gone because we don’t like the idea: we do. The concept of an upgradable phone that you swap parts in and out of as needed is certainly alluring, if only from a sustainability perspective to reduce the endless piles of e-waste that modern society generates. That’s probably why this one keeps resurfacing every few years. Promises are made, concept demos released, yet none of it reaches a final product. It needs to stay gone because we’re tired of being disappointed.

Again, the closest you’ll get to an actual modular phone is the Fairphone 6, designed to be user serviceable with replaceable parts for the most common repairs. The cameras, USB-C port, battery, and screen can all be easily replaced with a Torx screwdriver, and there are a handful of modules that can be attached to the case for extra functionality, such as a lanyard case, cardholder, or finger loop. That’s the sort of modularity we can get behind. 

Icons used to make sense. The App Store was an actual shopping basket. The Notepad app looked like a piece of lined paper or a yellow Post-It note. The camera app looked like a camera. Gmail was the letter M coming out of an envelope. It was called skeuomorphism because the design mimicked the look, feel, or function of the real world. You didn’t need to be told what everything did because it was obvious, even if it did end up looking a bit cheesy.

Now all we get is a generic, bland, abstract iconography design language, where everything has to conform to glass bubbles or white squares, perhaps with just a nod to what the icon used to be for those who are in the know (or old). For anyone new to smartphones, it’s just another thing to learn rather than intuit. Weirdly, skeuomorphic iconography remains in some curious places, like a phone handset symbol being used on most devices when many people have not used a landline in twenty years, or a floppy disk as the universal button for the save action. 

Ahh, Google Cardboard, you were truly the worst thing to ever happen to virtual reality. The concept was simple: slot your expensive and powerful phone into a tacky cardboard case, strap it to your head, and it would track your head movement for simple gaming or to display side-by-side 3D content. But bad optics, bad thermal management, and terrible apps combined to make you … well, nauseous, at best. GearVR took things a notch up with a horrible plastic holder instead of literal cardboard, but at least it was developed with Oculus expertise for slightly less sickness induction.

The whole ordeal reduced the barrier of entry to VR, but the experience was bad enough that it put some users off VR for life … or at least a long while. There is hope, though. The best, simplest way to experience VR wirelessly and without the need for a powerful gaming PC is currently still the Meta Quest 3, but Valve (developers of the Steam gaming platform and Steam Deck portable gaming hardware) plan to release their own headset later this year, which might knock Meta off the top spot.