Would you pay for a phone built for you?

Yes, but the phone I want wouldn't require giving information about what I want. I'd prefer a barebones operating system that I can make calls and texts from and which gets security updates for a looong time. How long? Whatever component is likely to die first, see if we can address that ( and so on) so the device hardware can last a long time, then make sure it can get firmware updates, etc. I have a Samsung Galaxy S3 I'd like to use but I'm scared to out of security concerns, so I use this six-year-old iPhone instead.

My phone would have physical switches for toggling gps, data, Wi-Fi, bt, etc.

I only use my phone for driving and hot spot.

Yes. I primarily am interested in removing hardware (and its related software) I don't use. Things like user facing camera and most of the back facing cameras; ml processing hardware.

I would pay for it with just those things removed, but would be more excited if I could exchange those parts for other things I do use. Like more battery/cpu/ram.

Currently I use a pixel7a, and the last few phones I have bought have been pixel phones. I haven't been excited about a new pixel in a while because I don't really care about the features they have been adding. I get new ones as I break them. I tend to buy the pixel phones because its pretty easy to root and modify.

Getting something with pixel-ish hardware that has more hardware focused on what I use it for and running either stock android or something graphenOS would be an instant buy for me.

The only phone features that matter to me at this point are root access and the ability to interface with all of the systems that rely on "owning a phone" that are increasingly mandatory, such as payment processors and authentication services. As far as I can tell this is not available anywhere

Impossible to pull this off unless you're Apple, Samsung, or Google. You need to first standardize the entire hardware market, just as IBM PCs did in the 1980s with "PC Compatible" and the famous ISA slot. Sorry, but unless you're sitting in a high position at one of these companies, you're crazy for even trying.

No. The phones I can buy are good enough for me, good enough for me is good enough for me and I don’t care enough to spend time thinking it through.

I mean if I want a bigger battery, I can put a small power bank in my other pocket, if I want more compute, I will use my thinkpad, and if I want total control I will use Linux on it.

Also, I regularly start using phone features that I haven’t been using.

Good luck.

PS: Once I bought a phone based on the camera. It was not as good as a dedicated point and shoot. A cheap point and shoot.

Sure, but building a phone for me seems like a bad business plan. I want a 4.7" phone running Windows Mobile 10 (but with a browser that isn't awful; or maybe WP8 with the notification center fixed), and I want to pay $200 for it. Oh, and you've got to convince people to re-release their windows phone apps, which I don't think you will.

I'd settle for an Android phone with a 5" screen and a headphone jack, that costs $200 and has 4gb ram and a decent cpu[1]. Be nice if it didn't ship with a bunch of stupid apps I'm just going to disable, but if it pays your bills, go ahead.

It should go without saying, but charge via usb-C.

[1] I don't think a phone should have 4gb ram, but they won't run Android worth a darn if they don't, so, that's just how it is, ram is cheap.

Yes, but what I want is so niche that I doubt anyone will make it. I want a dumbphone. A real dumbphone, not one of those pseudo-dumb stripped down ones running KaiOS. I want it to be able to make and receive calls and texts, and use an SD card for media that I received or want to send through texting. And nothing else.

No. Would probably be super expensive and the choices would probably not matter that much. What are we talking about? Headphone jacks and fingerprint sensors? Not worth the trouble of having the company die because only 30 power users cared and now I’m left with a brick 2 years in

Probably not. I wouldn’t even know what to ask for. I just wouldn’t mind a little more customization. Bloatware I can remove or hide.

I would be willing to pay triple for a phone I could customize to my liking. Something that was rugged and dependable like the simple phones of y2k, yet capable with a microprocessor of today. Eliminating threats like ai capabilities. Having a removable battery and multiple sim ports with a switch. Hell, I’d go in at $5k without a thought. For me, being able to truly disconnect from the grid is essential. Not have to worry about having a tiny capacitor that is giving signal after the battery is disabled. The peace of mind is worth a lot.

Yes, with indicator leds instead of AOD. Flashlight and voice recorder when holding a dedicated button down. No front facing camera.

No, any small, cheapish, refurbished iPhone is much better than I need it to be.

An electric razor and a flask to put the whiskey in.

Preload a few TB worth of books on it.

Hasn't this been tried several times already, like with the old Moto modular phones, the Fairphone, etc.? I think they all suffer from the same underlying problem: phones are cheap commodities with tremendous economies of scale, primarily dominated by huge companies pumping out millions of them a year.

Personally, I've been happy with the Pixel phones for the last few years. No significant bloat worth mentioning, camera is fine, battery is fine... it just works and doesn't require any excessive pricing or customization. Also has first-party security updates, which seems far more reliable than yet another small startup making custom phones that will probably go out of business in a year or two.

If anything, all I'd want is smaller Pixel to fit my tiny hands better...

I think I would. If a company like Framework made a phone I would 100% buy it. Hot-swappable parts would be great but I'm not quite sure how that would work in the form factor of a cell phone.

There are so many phones that are reasonably priced, which makes your quest redundant. I am using a $200 phone with 6+8 GB RAM, 256GB storage, 60+mpx camera, decent CPU/GPU/pixels. It took my a couple of afternoons to fine-tune and remove the bloatware, and now -1 year later- the phone rocks as it did the first day.

So unless you can make a similar phone with e.g. 100+ mpx camera, I wouldn't change mine - but that's me - perhaps you can sell to 'fanboys', but they will have to be plenty of them to make your business sustainable. And if the phone is so stellar they will never upgrade/replace it, right?

lets start with a 4/5g telephone with MMS, a calculator, a camera...no apps, no google/apple/spyware and a qwerty keyboard - we can talk after those parts are down. Because right now - we still dont have that. Nor do we have enough people that desire that outside of a tiny percentage of HNers that might want it :/

From a Hardware side, I have nothing to say about this right now. But from a Software side, my Librem 5 matches these points exactly:

- No more bloatware

- just the features you want and the power you need

- choosing your preferred operating system

Obviously the battery and camera quality do not match what you are describing, but a Free operating system enables you to install/remove whatever the heck you might want.

I want modules the same size as the portable computer that slide onto the front and the back of it. There should be no limit in the number of modules one can slide on either side.

On the screen side you can slide a lid, game controls, a qwerty keyboard that folds open or slides downwards, a set of speakers or an extra screen.

The batteries slide onto the back or the front. As many as I want to bring. The phone it self (since it doesn't work without its main battery) doesn't have to be entirely flat, it may have some bumps to accommodate bulky components. The back of the battery should be flat but the other side should of course have space for the bumps.

The batteries should also fit on the front side so that the weight is part of the keyboard.

Making phones as thin as possible is not self evident, I want to chose how much battery life I'm going to bring. Batteries just get old, the advertised and bench-marked time is for new devices. Charging not an interesting activity to me. The extra weight is not an issue. Actually, that it is so light and flimsy is annoying at times.

The attachments can have data or even whole computers in them. Publish a standard. In stead of apps you could buy physical attachments that you can swap. TB's of game assets, your entire music and movie library. All of your videos and photos. A pirate box seems fun or some other server. Have other phones connect to your wifi hotspot and play lan games without involvement of the mothership.

edit: Ideas are cheap, and with ideas I mean your ideas :P