And there it is, not only is it cheaper to produce a phone with less features, you've been given a reason to make another purchase to replace the now missing feature

(Not saying you don't need a smart watch, I have one too and it's much better than an led! Just the removal of a feature to make something else paid seem more attractive is a common one now)

[–] Iridium@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This doesn’t really make much sense in this context though.

All iPhones have the feature built-in by using the camera’s flash LED. Androids have the same camera flash LEDs, but the software side simply doesn’t use them for this purpose. There’s no “cheaper production” here since the components are already there. Dedicated notification lights are gone, but the flash LED is efficient enough to serve the same purpose these days

Pretty sure you can still enable the flash LED on Galaxy phones under accessibility but I don’t have one to check - not sure about other android phones but I’m sure there’s a third party app that does it anyway.

[–] RedRuM@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You've misunderstood the original post, many android phones had an RGB LED on the device just for notifications as well as the flash. That RGB LED is now gone, so it's hardware that's been removed which makes the device cost less to produce, at least in theory.