You’ll notice mid to high end Motorola phones do not have the headphone jack, that’s because they know those segments are more likely to afford being able to pay for their Moto wireless headphones, while mid to low end phones still have it. In North America, where your choices are primarily Apple, Google, Samsung, and Motorola, they are able to capture that part of the market, people who are too poor or unwilling to pay for wireless earbuds, or are unwilling to forfeit the feature to for better specs elsewhere

Sorry yes. The fairphone removed the headphone jack in their phones awhile ago. They now sell wireless earbuds, which goes completely against their purported philosophy.

To sell wireless headphones for $100+, higher revenue per person, and provide a non dorky way to listen to stuff through your smartwatch. All of them have wireless earbuds and smart watches. You need to replace them when the non removable battery dies so it’s really a wireless headphone subscription. Apple’s practice for the watch were the two final iPod nanos. Attaching it to your wrist with a headphone cord running up your arm looked dorky. Apple doesn’t do dorky, Android OEMs didn’t want smartwatches with headphone jacks to look dorky either. And Android OEMs often copy Apple because Apple is the more stylish one

As someone who’s been a hardware engineer at Apple and left specifically because I saw they were getting rid of the headphone jack, it is not the engineers that get to make those kinds of decisions. The decision to remove the headphone jack was so they could sell you $100+ air pods that would then also work with your Apple Watch. It was not because there was no space or that ingress protection was unachievable, or it cost to much, or people didn’t want it. Trick Dacy is right.

By the way, I rock a Linux phone now with a headphone jack, removable battery, microSD, and have an Android with a headphone jack, microSD as my backup. If the Fairphone 6 had a headphone jack, which is the #1 requested feature on every forum post I’ve seen, it would be the perfect phone, especially given it can have both Android and Linux on it.

Google installs the module silently in the background automatically if you have Play Services, it is not related to your OS version. It can be removed with adb, or in some cases disabled

Yes, you can just install the apps you want, then remove the ones you don’t, like the browser or app store. Though if you care about updates (app, security) you may want a script that does that for you