The 4 upgrades smartphone makers should really be focusing on

• Multi-day battery life
• Real durability without a case
• Streamlined interfaces
• Full user repairability

Something I suspect a lot of people miss is that the upgrades products get — from headphones and laptops to electric cars and PEVs — are not pre-ordained. Some changes may be so obvious that there’s no way to sidestep them, but often, the upgrades companies choose are the most cost-effective ones, not the ones customers care about. We all want EVs with 400 miles of range, for example, but it’s a lot more cost-effective to install “luxury” materials or slightly more powerful speakers. Automakers can upcharge for them without taking a huge hit to their profit margins.

This gap might be even more obvious in the smartphone world, where some complaints that have been around since 2007 have yet to be dealt with, at least the way most of us would prefer. I’d like to call some of these out right now, along with more recent gripes based on the mature industry. I’m not expecting any of these to be dealt with, but it certainly feels good howling into the void, sometimes.

Multi-day battery life

The ultimate upgrade?

It’s easy to forget, but in the pre-smartphone era, it was taken for granted that a cellphone would last multiple days on a charge. The first one I ever owned was a tiny LG clamshell, and even that could be counted on to run about three days or so. That was certainly welcome as a poor 20-something. I had to save money wherever I could, including the cost of running my phone.

Since the iPhone, it’s become de facto for most smartphones to last no more than a day without power-saving enabled. That’s actually fine in most circumstances, but it can quickly become trouble during all-day travel, or when an extended power outage hits your area. I was living in Austin during Texas’ infamous 2021 snow storm, and I’m lucky indeed that I had a backup power source.

It’s nice not to panic if you accidentally forget to plug your phone in at night, or want to watch an hour of YouTube.

Extreme circumstances aside, it’s nice not to panic if you accidentally forget to plug your phone in at night, or want to watch an hour of YouTube while you wait for your car to get fixed. This is why I’m so offended by devices like the iPhone Air and Galaxy S25 Edge — they’re a step backwards, pretending that being thinner and lighter is worth walking a battery tightrope every day.

The good news is that things are otherwise headed in the right direction. Silicon-carbon batteries are enabling some true two-day phones, and the better devices without that technology can still make it a little over a day if you’re careful.

Real durability without a case

Expensive should not be fragile

One of the most famous phones ever released is the original Nokia 3310. There were a few things that made it unique at the time, but its legend began once people discovered how rugged it was. It was not only drop-proof in most situations, but tough enough to survive getting run over by a slow-speed car, or falling out a window. I can virtually guarantee a Z Fold7 won’t work if you crush it with a tire.

Durability matters for a couple of reasons, first of course being how important smartphones have become to our daily lives. If my iPad broke, I’d be upset, but I could live without it. If my phone broke, I’d be rushing to the store to get it fixed or buy a new one.

I would gladly buy a plain but indestructible rubber-sealed device over another glass slab.

The other issue is value. It’s ridiculous that you can spend upwards of $800 on a must-own device and still worry about whether its screen will crack when hitting the floor without a case. What’s even more ridiculous is that cases prove the solution is cheap and readily available — smartphone makers are just prioritizing aesthetics or profit margins (again). I would gladly buy a plain but indestructible rubber-sealed device over another glass slab.

To be fair, progress is happening within the boundaries smartphone makers have set for themselves. Gorilla Glass continues to improve, and most flagship phones have IP67 dust and water resistance, if not IP68.

Streamlined interfaces

Not all of us read tech sites daily

This is the one point where I, personally, don’t have any skin in the game. I’ve been using smartphones for well over a decade at this stage, and I was already technically inclined before then. I’ve never had any serious trouble navigating around iOS or Android. I might briefly get confused when it comes to an obscure feature, but that’s usually solved with a quick bit of exploration or a Google search.

A lot of people aren’t so fortunate. There are, of course, people older than myself who never had a computer growing up, much less a smartphone, and they sometimes struggle if they don’t have a clerk or family member to guide them. Casual digital natives may run into trouble with advanced features, which are sometimes buried deep within menus or behind counter-intuitive commands. Want to manually update all your iPhone apps at once? The easiest way is actually to tap and hold the App Store icon, select Updates, then Update All. Otherwise, you have to launch the App Store and select your account profile, which is not the first place I’d look if I were new to Apple products.

There has to be some way of streamlining things and making them more intuitive. If nothing else, smartphones need (optional) interactive tutorials for every important feature.

Full user repairability

Upgrades would be nice, too

Beyond the Fairphone, this is the one least likely to happen. It can be a deep technical challenge, for one thing, at least when a company is trying to deliver maximum performance in the smallest possible package. That requires optimizing every millimeter of space, which doesn’t lend itself to easily accessible screws, much less inserting third-party components that might not match the originals’ dimensions.

Repairability is improving, thanks in part to the rise of right-to-repair legislation.

The other hurdle is greed, however. If it were simple to fix the average smartphone on your own using cheap, widely-available parts and tools, you could keep one running almost indefinitely until its software or specs were obsolete. That might actually open the window to upgradability too, and I’m sure nothing terrifies Apple or Samsung more than someone giving another company several hundred dollars every 10 years than paying them a thousand every three or four.

Repairability is improving, thanks in part to the rise of right-to-repair legislation. Yet it’s going to be a long time before a cracked screen is a minor inconvenience instead of a massive headache.