I never understood why I needed a flagship phone when a midrange was sufficient for my needs. But there is a first time for everything. I changed my mind about premium phones only after experiencing them. While I’m still a strong advocate for high-end phones, its gap with the mid-tier has narrowed over the last few years, raising doubts about the value proposition of top-of-line phones. This isn’t a difficult problem to solve. It just 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 users’ choices and be testing grounds for controversial changes
Good intentions must be matched with good actions
I’m not against giving the best possible experience to the highest-paying consumers. However, you’ll get different answers from phone makers and consumers regarding what’s in users’ best interest. Often, companies make controversial changes to serve their interests more than the buyers’.
We’ve seen this in action multiple times. Remember how phone makers justified the exclusion of microSD card slots from premium handsets? In an interview with Engadget, while defending the move to remove the SD card slot in Xiaomi 4i, the company’s then VP, Hugo Barra, said that microSD cards are “slow” and “confusing” for users and can cause problems such as the risk of losing data, app crashes. While those might be genuine concerns in some cases, the ulterior motive wasn’t only about providing what’s best for consumers.
The performance of internal storage is superior to that of microSD cards in terms of speed. However, flagship phones should not be limited to high performance. They should also provide high value. We don’t need that level of performance to store songs, photographs, documents, and music videos. Top-quality microSD cards are more than sufficient for this. So, 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. It’s one of the classic tactics to increase the revenue per user.
Removing something under the guise of serving users isn’t an on-off incident in smartphone history. The headphone jacks were removed and justified as freeing space for other components. Recently, phone makers stopped including chargers in the box to reduce e-waste. These controversial changes are first tested with flagship phone buyers and then brought to midrange phones when consumers have no other option but to adapt.
It doesn’t impact flagship buyers because they’re more willing to spend on additional accessories and will likely be seen as “early adopters.” Companies project this willingness to buy replacements as a false sense of demand. When these changes gain acceptance years later, phone manufacturers slowly introduce them to lower-end phones, and the price-sensitive people pay the price.
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3 Hardware-based privacy control should be paramount
Privacy should not just exist but needs to be felt to be protected
There is a lot that Windows laptops and Android phones can learn from each other when it comes to privacy control. I like the privacy shutter on my Lenovo Yoga 7i laptop and argue that something similar should be available on premium mobile phones. Pop-up selfie cameras on phones like the OnePlus 7 Pro were great alternatives to laptop privacy shutters since they’re hidden when not in use. Still, they were never widely adopted due to reliability concerns 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 because of their downsides, but anything that serves the purpose will do the job. A privacy shutter or a camera stop switch that can turn off my front camera will give me peace of mind that no bad actors are capturing me. Fortunately for phone makers, it isn’t unheard of on a phone. For one, the PinePhone has as many as six such switches to give users greater control over their phones.
While introducing a privacy shutter that resembles a laptop on a phone’s selfie camera might be an engineering challenge, adding a camera stop switch on one of the edges should be less complicated. It’s a way to better utilize space than an Alert Slider or Action Button.
Apart from the selfie camera, a dedicated mic-off button would be another great addition. A hardware switch for microphone control will complement existing software-based control options. Instead of relying solely on the app permissions, which malware can manipulate, a dedicated mic-off button brings a greater degree of control to ensure that 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 get access to useful tools in a device right away. However, nobody likes to have two different tools to do the same thing. You’ll find many redundant apps, even on the best Android phones. If you use a Samsung Galaxy phone, you’ll see apps like Samsung Internet, Samsung Notes, Samsung Calendar, and more alongside Google’s preinstalled software, which is more popular than Samsung’s. You’ll also see bloatware from third-party players. For example, several Microsoft 365 apps, including OneDrive, Outlook, OneNote, LinkedIn, and more, come with a Samsung phone.
This isn’t limited to Samsung. Even OnePlus, once an advocate of a clean Android experience, adds bloatware. While some apps like Link to Windows are useful, apps like OnePlus Membership and Community don’t serve any real purpose unless you’re a OnePlus enthusiast. Instead, they eat up valuable memory storage. Even worse, the company pushes bloatware onto customers during the initial setup. Google has also become a serial offender. Things have worsened with the arrival of the Google Pixel 9, which is packed with loads of AI bloat.
Some of these apps are easy to uninstall, but many aren’t. For example, you can only disable the Samsung Internet app but not remove it from your Samsung phone. If you rely on Google Chrome for your web browsing, the Samsung Internet app is an unnecessary 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 lines have blurred between mid-rangers and flagships, it’s time phone makers offer their flagship buyers things that matter. It might not be feasible for companies to ship phones devoid of bloatware because they get financial incentives when they preinstall those tools. However, the amount of bloatware can be minimal, or there should be an easy way to get rid of it, at least for those who paid a hefty price for a flagship. A cleaner Android experience would add value to high-end Android phones.
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1 Faster updates across all flagship models should be the norm
All flagship buyers should be treated equally when it comes to rolling out updates
Since hardware innovation in the phone industry has plateaued, there is little to no reason to buy a flagship every year. However, on the software side, another major improvement phone makers might consider, other than shipping minimal bloatware, is a more robust mechanism to ship software updates. While a two-year-old top-tier phone has the same performance as the latest flagship in real-world scenarios, software updates always come late in older handsets.
Phone makers shouldn’t discriminate based on who has the latest phones when rolling out software updates, at least in the premium segment. Flagship buyers who have used their phones for a couple of 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 Galaxy S24 and S23. With greater software development and testing efficiency, it won’t be a mountain to climb for the phone makers to roll out software updates faster for their older premium models, if not on the same day as the latest ones.
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Phone makers need to focus on the right path to make flagships great again
Companies don’t always need to reinvent the wheel to add more value to flagship phones. Even if some groundbreaking hardware innovation happens in the next couple of years, implementing that technology well enough to get people to use it to gain mindshare will be a different ball game. Those are the problems of the future. Part of the focus must be on current issues, which require resources to address the basic pain points to improve the experience. It’s straightforward: getting the simple things right is premium.
