Why More Features Don't Always Make Technology More Useful
Key Points(5)
- Why does your junk drawer always have three garlic presses and zero scissors when you actually need them?
- Because stuff keeps getting added and nothing ever gets taken out.
- Your phone is that same drawer.
- Somewhere between the barcode scanner, the AI photo tool, and the sleep tracker you opened once, it stopped being a phone and started being a pile.
- That's the whole reason an easy-to-use flip phone is having a moment again.
Why does your junk drawer always have three garlic presses and zero scissors when you actually need them?
Because stuff keeps getting added and nothing ever gets taken out.
Your phone is that same drawer. Somewhere between the barcode scanner, the AI photo tool, and the sleep tracker you opened once, it stopped being a phone and started being a pile.
That's the whole reason an easy-to-use flip phone is having a moment again.
Not nostalgia.
Just people in search of a device that does the job without making them dig for it.
Real Features, Real Backlash, Real Removals
The tech industry has a long history of shipping a "revolutionary" feature, watching people avoid it in practice, and then walking it back a few years later. In addition, we flagged a few that actually happened.
● 3D Touch (iPhone 6S to iPhone XS, 2015 to 2019). Press-sensitive menus that let you push harder on the screen for shortcuts. Apple dropped it entirely from the iPhone 11 lineup and replaced it with a simple long press. Most users never even discovered it was there.
● The MacBook Pro Touch Bar (2016 to 2021). A touchscreen strip that replaced physical function keys. Apple let it go in the 2021 redesign and brought the physical keys back after five years of developers barely building for it and users mostly ignoring it.
● Samsung's dedicated Bixby button (2017 to 2019). A hardware button that couldn't be turned off or remapped at launch. People hated accidentally triggering it so much that Samsung eventually caved and let users reassign it and later dropped the standalone button altogether.
● Amazon's Fire Phone "Dynamic Perspective" (2014). Four extra front cameras just to make icons shift in 3D when you tilt the phone. Amazon took a $170 million write-down and pulled the phone from shelves within a year.
Every one of these launched as the headline feature in a keynote.
Every one of them got stripped back once real people had to actually live with it.
The Pattern Behind All Four
None of these were badly built. They were just added to solve a problem nobody had, and they cost something real in return:
● Battery and storage spent running features most people never open.
● Learning curve, since every new gesture or button is one more thing to remember.
● Accidental triggers, like Bixby firing off in your pocket.
● Development time, which could have gone toward making the core experience faster instead.
Complexity, not missing capability, is usually what kills the return on the investment.
Phones aren't so different. Think about what you actually reach for one to do most days:
● Call someone;
● Check the time;
● Check the weather before you leave;
● Catch the local news on your commute…
None of that needs four extra built-in scanners or a button you can't turn off.
The Features That People Actually Use
Strip away the launch-keynote extras and the numbers get almost boring.
A Pew Research study that tracked real phone use over a full week found 97% of users texted at least once and 92% made or received a call, making those two the most reliably used functions on any phone, smart or not.
Texting and Calling Still Win
Not because people are old-fashioned.
Because a text and a call are the two things a phone was built to do, and they still work the same way whether the device costs $50 or $1,300.
Every extra layer on top—chat reactions, read receipts, disappearing messages—adds friction to a job that was already solved decades ago.
The Camera
Unlike most bolted-on features, the camera actually gets used daily by the majority of owners, which is why it survived the feature-cutting trend that killed off 3D Touch and Dynamic Perspective.
It solves a real want: capture a moment without carrying a second device.
The Alarm Clock
A worldwide phone-usage survey conducted by GSMArena found that the humble alarm clock was the second most-used feature on smartphones overall, checked daily by 83% of users, beating out texting and trailing only voice calls.
It doesn't require an account, a permission prompt, or a tutorial. You set a time and it works, which is exactly why it survived every redesign that came after it.
The Test That Actually Predicts If a Feature Survives
There's a pattern hiding in which features get keynote applause and which ones fade out a few years later, and it has nothing to do with how advanced they are.
It's whether the feature replaces something you already carried in your pocket, your bag, or your daily routine before smartphones existed.
● A ruler app works because people used to carry actual rulers (very suitable for the everyday worker).
● A flashlight works because people used to carry actual flashlights (finds its use in dark times and hard-to-reach places too).
● A compass, a level, a magnifier, and a thermometer reading the room—none of these are flashy, but they all map onto a physical tool someone once bought separately (even if you’re not a scout, you’ll eventually need to use some of these).
● And one “personal” question: how many of us have actual clocks on the wall? As a piece of furniture, maybe. But we rely on our phone to check the clock or set the alarm constantly.
That's why they're still sitting on your phone, untouched for months, ready the one day you need them, instead of getting deleted in a software update.
