Comment by hackrmn

I haven't thought about it as much as I have about sizes, but you do have an interesting point to ponder. I can only offer an explanation, but no consolation:

I guess electronics has gotten denser, and density for the same volume is what quite literally translates to larger weight. The density thing is because they're able to cram more electronics, as our fabrication technology inches forward (i.e. Intel/TSMC/Nvidia/etc trying to break the 1nm barrier for transistors).

Remember the old Nokia phones, where the plastic shell likely amounted to as much volume that a modern phone instead dedicates to the entire front camera device? The latter will weigh much more than the plastic, for the same volume. Now apply that to _every_ component in the modern phone, and the difference is multiplicative -- there's just more features in every cubic millimeter of the phone today. No wonder it's getting heavier.

I don't but could you not forget that some people don't have a car. You can walk or use transit in proper cities. When I need a bag then it is not a phone it is a laptop without keyboard.

The context is the same though, regardless of screen size? The UI and/or UX doesn't change much when the screen is physically smaller? The resolution usually stays the same, and even if it shrank or grew, most apps wouldn't care as the libraries used to render their widgets are more or less "resolution invariant".

I mean I get what you're implying, I am just making sure I understand the meaning of "context" here. But if you have large fingers, smaller buttons obviously make the device harder to use, no two ways about it. However, in Android and iOS both, it's possible (for the user) to scale everything up, to help solve that very problem.

The bigger battery argument is a valid one too, but you have to keep in mind that most of the battery is consumed by the screen on average, and larger screen will eat more battery, so it's a bit like the rocket equation -- bigger rocket needs more fuel, more fuel needs more space and adds weight to the rocket, more rocket more fuel again and so on. In terms of batteries and rockets both, there's a golden middle there somewhere, I think. But it's a moving quantity since both screens and batteries are different -- OLED vs LED-lit LCD screen and LiPo vs LiOn for battery and so on. In short: I don't think a 5,5" phone (my preferred size) will suffer from shorter battery life, perhaps on the contrary (vs. a 6,5"). Especially considering that _large_ phones tend to be made _thinner_, since their ergonomics depends more on thickness (for the large width and height), perhaps becoming a problem with more than 8mm thickness, while a 5,5" phone can in fact be used comfortably even if it was 8-10mm thick, since it's smaller in the other two dimensions. That extra afforded thickness can directly translate to a battery that is as large or larger in terms of capacity as one for a 7mm "slick" 6,5" phone.

Hi, Quick Cursor dev here.

I completely agree with you, my app functionality should be built inside the OS because of better integration, privacy reasons, etc.

I just wanted to add that because of this permissions my app needs in order to work, I will never add the internet permission to Quick Cursor. I took this decission 5 years ago when I started the app because I understood the privacy risk, and my app will never have internet access permission.

In order for an app to have access to internet, it needs to have the android.permission.INTERNET added to its manifest, otherwise it won't work. This can be checked easily, there are some apps that shows you this info about your installed apps, or by manually looking at the AndroidManifest in the .APK of the app.

I have to say reading the statement "requires some pretty aggressive permissions to work" sounds like there's a problem with Android permissions model. I mean, if the app needs permissions, one should normally assume it needs these permissions in order to, well, be permitted to do its work? In other words, a "good-natured" app should not need more permissions than it needs to work, and the last part is kind of a tautology. Either that, or Android has broken permissions model, which may apparently be too coarse -- as in you need "access to Internet" for auto-update to work, despite auto-update normally being done by Google (when a Google-forked Android) over a secure channel etc.

Hmm, or they fabricate the demand so they can fulfill it. SUVs anyone?

The problem isn't that this hypothetical vocal minority is completely imaginary, but that consumers will repeatably gravitate toward the biggest and most glitterliest product. Only few realizes it's not what they want.

The problem isn’t that the majority of phones are big, it’s that virtually all are big and heavy. There is no modern, properly supported smartphone with 4.x” or 5.x” diagonal or below 150 grams anymore.

In all frankness, I think this is the legandary "if people wanted a faster horse..." statement of Henry Ford -- consumers don't always know what they want, and I know quite a few who couldn't confidently answer the question "why did you buy a 6,5" iPhone?" with anything else but "I have used iPhone all my life and this is the size they sell", meaning the consumer doesn't choose much, the choice is to buy a newer iPhone. The simplified argument that goes along "phones are getting larger because consumers want larger phones" is indeed only that -- a very simplified way to look at it. There's much more going on there.

It's very similar to smart TVs. Yes, most people do prefer smart TVs, but vendors use it very successfully to sell inferior displays (poor color, poor contrast etc), to compensate and to pull more selling margin, since that's how the consumer functions (being utterly unable to quantify display quality for an uncalibrated TV). Anyway, I am digressing -- the point of my comparison is that it's complicated and not nearly as simple as "consumers want larger phones / TVs with slow menus and shitty picture as long as there's Netflix in there".

Yes, but no "flagship" devices from mainstream brands, only specialty/novelty stuff. The last <6" flagship I'm aware of was the Asus Zenphone 10 in 2023.

Yes and now.

Technically yes: there is iPhone 13 Mini and in Android world there is 2 or 3 Unihertz models and some "no-name" Chinese Aliexpress brands (Cubot has some small model, AFAIR, and there is several even more no-name offers).

Realistically no. All these Android models are underspecced. Old cores (8+ years old), small screen resolutions (small in PPI, not like small as screen proportion to big ones), small amount of RAM and storage (latest Uniherz is happy exception in this area, but not in the others), very bad cameras, very short OS update period (if ever).

iPhone 13 mini is Ok-ish (my wife uses one): camera is still very poor, but all other is usable.

Android is worse. If all you need are phone calls, and messaging with Telegram/Whatsapp/Signal it is Ok. But if you need good camera, good browsing experience (many open tabs) or something specific you are out of luck. Even Google Maps could be sluggish. Plus zero-days in old Android versions.

Good cameras is my pet peeve: good ones go only to flagship models and maybe sub-flagship ones (like, flagship and sub-flagship can be differentiated by addition of tele-module, which is most useful for me).

yes. I use this one https://www.unihertz.com/products/jelly-star

I think your argument is flawed -- perhaps rephrasing it to say is that _Apple_ tried bringing back a smaller _iPhone_ and _presumably_ few _existing_ customers bought them, would have made a better one? Because I would assume most of iPhone buyers are either _existing_ iPhone users, or people who swear to Apple software (iOS, MacOS) so this is about being able to read the statistics correctly.

Add to the above that iPhone "mini" might have been slower or just "worse" and it wasn't just the screen that was reduced in size, so the word of mouth might have been that the phone is simply worse, and that contributed to poor sales.

There's no way of telling how a 5,5" phone would fare until there's consistent prolonged feature-parity based sales of such phones that are otherwise identical to other offerings by the same brand, across multiple brands (if I am a die-hard Fairphone customer, I am not buying an iPhone regardless of screen size) to help gather proper statistics.

As the article points out, the iPhone 13 mini sold half as much as the other iPhone 13 models, while competing with the iPhone SE which was the same size at half the price. That isn’t exactly terrible.