For the physical part? A couple cents per phone sold.

But it's also one less part for for the circuit board designers to accomodate in their ever-shrinking layouts, one less part to inventory, track, and warehouse, one less behavior to verify by Q&A, one less SW and/or HDL code module to maintain, etc etc etc. When you look at the entire design, verification, and manufacturing process, multiplied by millions of units, every part and behavior carries a cost.

There are plenty of valid reasons to crap on the major phone manufacturers, especially when they take away features and capabilities we like. But "it's just one small part" usually isn't one of them.

OLED displays certainly could, but there is no baked it app that wakes up the screen only if you have a message, blink in different colors or frequencies depending on the message and use the low power always on display api.

Yeah, you can glance at your always on display and make out the little symbol. But that's not an adequate replacement to the notification LED. If I had to guess, it was removed to drive up engagement with your phone.

No they don't.

Also, keyboard phones don't sell because they don't make good ones.

I wouldn't call the "always on display" some kind of innovative technology that makes notification LEDs obsolete... AOD is a battery draining complement to notification LEDs, not a replacement -- we just don't have the latter anymore because of corporate greed and consumer mentalities :/

I'd still prefer you didn't do that

My car has T9 input which is much better than a full touchscreen keyboard, especially since I have a ton of practice from the old Nokia days

Controversial: Drinking while driving was easier and safer with a beer helmet since you can just sip directly from the straw instead of looking down to pick up the can.