I never understood why I needed a flagship phone when a mid-range one was enough for my needs. But there is a first time for everything. I changed my mind about premium phones only after testing them. While I’m still a strong advocate for high-end phones, its gap with the mid-range has narrowed in recent years, raising doubts about the value proposition of high-end phones. This is not a difficult problem to solve. It simply takes effort to reimagine what a flagship phone can offer. If I were a manufacturer, I would introduce four changes to make flagship phones great again.
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4 Flagship phones shouldn’t limit user choices and serve as a testing ground for controversial changes
Good intentions must go hand in hand with good actions
I’m not against providing the best possible experience for high-paying consumers. However, you’ll get different answers from phone manufacturers and consumers as to what’s in the users’ best interest. Often, companies make controversial changes to serve their interests more than those of buyers.
We’ve seen this in action many times. Remember how phone makers justified excluding microSD card slots from high-end handsets? In an interview with EngadgetWhile defending the removal of the SD card slot from the Xiaomi 4i, Hugo Barra, then vice president of the company, said that microSD cards are “slow” and “confusing” for users and can cause problems such as the risk of loss of data and applications. crashes. While these concerns may be real in some cases, the ulterior motive was not just to provide the best for consumers.
The performance of internal storage is superior to microSD cards in terms of speed. However, flagship phones don’t have to be limited to high performance. They must also offer high value. We don’t need this level of performance to store songs, photographs, documents and video clips. For this, high quality microSD cards are more than sufficient. As a result, I end up paying extra to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Instead of buying a microSD card, you either buy a cloud storage subscription or get the higher storage variant of the phone, which can be more expensive than an SD card. This is one of the classic tactics for increasing revenue per user.
Removing something under the guise of serving users is not a one-time incident in the history of smartphones. The headphone jacks were removed and justified as freeing up space for other components. Recently, phone manufacturers have stopped including chargers in the box to reduce e-waste. These controversial changes are first tested with flagship phone buyers and then applied to mid-range phones when consumers have no choice but to adapt.
This does not impact anchor buyers, as they are more willing to spend on additional accessories and will likely be considered early adopters. Companies view this willingness to purchase replacements as a false sense of demand. When these changes are accepted years later, phone manufacturers slowly introduce them into low-end phones, and price-sensitive people pay the price.
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3 Hardware-based privacy control should be paramount
Privacy should not only exist, but should be felt protected
Windows laptops and Android phones can learn a lot from each other when it comes to privacy controls. I like the privacy shutter on my Lenovo Yoga 7i laptop and argue that something similar should be available on high-end mobile phones. Pop-up selfie cameras on phones like the OnePlus 7 Pro were great alternatives to laptop privacy shutters because they’re hidden when not in use. Yet they have never been widely adopted due to reliability issues and because they increase the weight of the phone. OnePlus got rid of it in 2020 with the OnePlus 8 series and never looked back.
Bringing back pop-up selfie cameras may not be a good idea due to their drawbacks, but anything that serves that purpose will do the trick. A privacy shutter or camera off switch that can turn off my front-facing camera will give me peace of mind knowing no bad actors are capturing me. Fortunately for phone makers, this is not uncommon on a phone. For one, the PinePhone has six such switches to give users greater control over their phone.
While introducing a laptop-like privacy shutter to a phone’s selfie camera might be a technical challenge, adding a camera off switch to one of the edges should be less complicated. It’s a way to make better use of space than an alert slider or action button.
Besides the selfie camera, a dedicated button to mute the mic would be another great addition. A hardware switch for microphone control will complement existing software control options. Instead of relying solely on app permissions, which malware can manipulate, a dedicated button to mute the mic brings a greater degree of control to ensure no one else is listening to everything you say, even when your phone is infected with malware.
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2 The less bloatware, the better
Less is more
I appreciate it when I have immediate access to useful tools in a device. However, no one likes having two different tools to do the same thing. You’ll find a lot of redundant apps even on the best Android phones. If you are using a Samsung Galaxy phone, you will see apps like Samsung Internet, Samsung Notes, Samsung Calendar, etc., along with Google’s pre-installed software, which is more popular than Samsung’s. You will also see bloatware from third-party players. For example, several Microsoft 365 apps including OneDrive, Outlook, OneNote, LinkedIn, etc. come bundled with a Samsung phone.
This is not limited to Samsung. Even OnePlus, once a proponent of a clean Android experience, is adding bloatware. While some apps like Link to Windows are useful, apps like OnePlus Membership and Community are of no use unless you’re a OnePlus enthusiast. Instead, they consume valuable memory. Worse yet, the company pushes bloatware onto clients during initial setup. Google has also become a serial offender. Things got worse with the arrival of the Google Pixel 9, which is packed with AI features.
Some of these apps are easy to uninstall, but many are not. For example, you can only disable the Samsung Internet app, but not delete it from your Samsung phone. If you rely on Google Chrome for your web browsing, the Samsung Internet app is a useless tool that serves no purpose other than denying storage to something more useful. Even worse, it can sometimes slow down your phone’s performance.
Since the lines have blurred between mid-range models and flagships, it’s time for phone makers to offer their flagship buyers things that matter. It may not be possible for companies to ship phones free of bloatware because they receive financial incentives for pre-installing these tools. However, the amount of bloatware may be minimal, or there should be an easy way to get rid of it, at least for those who paid a premium price for a flagship. A cleaner Android experience would add value to high-end Android phones.
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1 Faster updates on all flagship models should be the norm
All flagship buyers should be treated the same when it comes to rolling out updates
Since hardware innovation in the phone industry has stagnated, there’s virtually no reason to buy a flagship every year. However, on the software side, another major improvement phone makers could consider, aside from shipping minimal bloatware, is a more robust mechanism for shipping software updates. While a two-year-old high-end phone offers the same performance as the latest flagship in real-world scenarios, software updates still arrive late on older phones.
Phone makers shouldn’t discriminate based on who owns the latest phones when rolling out software updates, at least in the premium segment. Flagship buyers who have been using their phones for a few years or more shouldn’t be punished for late delivery of updates. I’ll have to wait months for the next One UI update to arrive on my Galaxy S21 from when it officially starts rolling out to models like the Galaxy S24 and S23. With greater efficiency in software development and testing, it won’t be a mountain for phone makers to roll out software updates for their older high-end models more quickly, or even on the same day as the latest ones. .
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Phone makers need to focus on the right path to making their flagships again
Companies don’t always need to reinvent the wheel to add more value to flagship phones. Even if groundbreaking hardware innovations happen in the next couple of years, implementing that technology well enough to get people to use it to gain mindshare will be another matter entirely. These are the problems of the future. Part of the focus needs to be on current issues, which require resources to address core issues to improve the experience. It’s simple: it’s essential to succeed in simple things.
