In past lives, I've clung to 3.5mm jacks and battery swaps (although I consider myself much reformed, yes I maybe would buy an updated LG v20 if one were released: that was an amazingly built metal slate of a phone with both. Just hot and slow, on that Snapdragon 820).
Today, bluetooth works quite well for me (I love not having cables... but it sucks that performance with a microphone is trashfire). 3.5mm adapters are cheap and easy when needed (rarely. I also have a $10 bluetooth->3.5mm in my travel kit that does get used once a year!). And with usb-c providing fast charging, I rarely feel like I'd benefit from battery swaps. I can give myself 50%+ in 30 minutes, with a portable battery that will power not just my phone, but any other device I run into. With Qi 2.2 releasing with 25W wireless charging, and magnetic coupling being standard now, you don't even need wires anymore. Carrying a bespoke phone-only battery seems like a massive downgrade today. (It also felt like a massive fire hazard!) Time to update your expectations!
Worth mentioning that battery swaps make water-resistance much much trickier to pull off. There' a real cost to battery-swappability.
I do wish we saw something like Ara, some phone modularity & extensibility. Fairphone has some modular parts, but it doesn't feel like an open ecosystem, and the parts dont seem super designed for expansion but more just replacement. I guess maybe Framework is doing the best work, albeit in a bigger form factor space, with their Expansion Cards, which are basically just a card form factor USB-C. Licensed CC-BY-4. https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/ExpansionCards
For me, the battery swap interest is down to using CGMs and uploading that data to a mesh of local "follower" devices belonging to family members, as well as to my Nightscout server. That's quite intensive with new data every minute. We've had blackouts here before, and it's those moments you really value stuff like battery banks, however, keeping them charged and making sure others don't siphon your juice from time to time can be annoying (lol!). Would be nice to keep an additional battery just for my device in my pouch of diabetes-related paraphernalia.
Once upon a time, I had a Motorola A920 in the early '00s that came with a dock to put a second battery into to charge it (pre-CGM era of course), but something like that would be lovely when combined with a foldable or flip phone.
Would love to recommend the Fairphone, but not available in every country. One of my cousins wanted one (his dad is diabetic too), but unfortunately not available to buy in Canada.
Hopefully Framework humour the idea of a phone at some point, but it'll be difficult to please everybody, and I'm not sure it's economically viable.
The Samsung XCover are mil-spec with swappable batteries (major selling point on their site) and don't struggle with being waterproof, so it can be done. I don't think it's as niche an idea as people would expect.
I excitedly followed the Ara for years! Was gutted it never amounted to anything.
Today, bluetooth works quite well for me (I love not having cables... but it sucks that performance with a microphone is trashfire). 3.5mm adapters are cheap and easy when needed (rarely. I also have a $10 bluetooth->3.5mm in my travel kit that does get used once a year!). And with usb-c providing fast charging, I rarely feel like I'd benefit from battery swaps. I can give myself 50%+ in 30 minutes, with a portable battery that will power not just my phone, but any other device I run into. With Qi 2.2 releasing with 25W wireless charging, and magnetic coupling being standard now, you don't even need wires anymore. Carrying a bespoke phone-only battery seems like a massive downgrade today. (It also felt like a massive fire hazard!) Time to update your expectations!
Worth mentioning that battery swaps make water-resistance much much trickier to pull off. There' a real cost to battery-swappability.
I do wish we saw something like Ara, some phone modularity & extensibility. Fairphone has some modular parts, but it doesn't feel like an open ecosystem, and the parts dont seem super designed for expansion but more just replacement. I guess maybe Framework is doing the best work, albeit in a bigger form factor space, with their Expansion Cards, which are basically just a card form factor USB-C. Licensed CC-BY-4. https://github.com/FrameworkComputer/ExpansionCards