>This happened to my mother's iPhone - it got slow so went to Apple store to get new battery. Problem though was that when they did that, they also broke the hard-button on the phone so it no longer worked. They installed an app on the phone that is a little floating button and told me that from now on she has to use that since the hard-button no longer worked. It was that - or just buy a new iphone. My mother didn't have a problem with using the app so didn't get another iphone .....but apparently this breaking of the button functionality is not an uncommon thing to have happen when they do battery swaps. I suspect that this could turn even more ugly for Apple since I'm sure a lot people were suckered into getting new phones like that.

I asked our daughter, who has a 7, "how do you replace the battery?". "You can't". That's what she heard.

On regular phones, there's always a way to replace a battery. I just replaced one in my 6 year old Nokia E5 for about 8$, and everything's dandy. And my wife just ditched her Coolpad E501 (you wouldn't know, it's sold mostly on that tiny stretch between the Balkans and Indonesia) because the parasite apps are multiplying fastly, so that after a full factory reset it takes only three days until it starts complaining about battery drain and CPU load. And of course you don't get the tools to clean those up unless you hack it.

Now I got that phone and I'm not using it (except once when I used it as a remote for my camera, also drains battery fast, on both the phone and camera, because they become just fancy wireless NICs). Trying to find a decent url with tools to root it and install LineageOS instead, then maybe I may start using it. Meanwhile, my wife bought a Nokia 216, yes with just a dozen buttons, but it's small, undemanding and even has both side cameras.