- 1. Supply chain / component R&D -
You will be very, very hard pressed to source a pre-existing, high quality, non-exclusive 5.4" display with a hole punch. If you end up doing this as your own startup then you're going to start by trying to buy off the shelf parts to keep costs down. But that display you want is simply not on any of the development roadmaps for the major component manufacturers. The industry has its own momentum, and the component suppliers have also been looking at the trendlines so they are building bigger and bigger.
If you can't find the screen you want in a catalogue then you have to pay someone to build it. Convincing BOE et. al that your phone will sell enough to pay off R&D costs is unlikely, so be prepared to pay several million bucks in NRE to make it worth their time (it might still not be) and the wait a year for them to spin up the fabs. So ~$5M and 9-18 months later you have a display.
- 2. Big players are uninterested, not uninformed -
Big companies are drowning in market data. They know some people really, really want small phones. But it's a long-tail opportunity they're willfully ignoring, and people who need phones will still buy something even if reluctantly. I've been in the meetings, small phone advocacy goes nowhere.
Also I'm a little surprised you're hoping an online petition will work after your prior experience trying to influence your acquirers. I presume you saw the inside of Fitbit / Google and how decisions are made...
I'll be blunt: no I won't. I reluctantly bought the phone I still use (a moto X4) back in 2019, at which point it was already getting old. It was one of the smaller Android phones available at the time; I measured it diagonally corner to corner (including bezel) at 159 mm (6.26 inches). The screen size is 130 mm (5.2 in) according to Wikipedia. This phone is in fact much too big for me, and I'm not happy with it.
But I will be sticking with this phone into the indefinite future: until it breaks, becomes unusable, or a worthy replacement arises (a phone the size of the Nexus 5X or preferably smaller, with my must-have features). In the event I can't get this I will switch to a cheap feature phone since I need something for emergency use. I'll look into the mp3 player market to see if there's something I can use for playing music and audio books, maybe if I'm lucky there's something with a nice screen and an e-reader.
I'm sure you're right and some people are more willing to compromise than me. However, what also seems likely is that many people are somewhere in between and will wait until their current phone is unusable before reluctantly downgrading to whatever the latest model is. Surely plenty of sales are lost due to this.
...so, a current flagship? Samsung's Galaxy S22 is smaller than both the Moto X4 and Nexus 5X.
Size comparison: https://www.phonearena.com/phones/size/Google-Nexus-5X,Motor...
In general, phone sizes have stayed roughly constant since the Nexus 5X, though the displays are getting bigger as the bezels get smaller.
Moreover, the specification that actually matters for one-handed phone users is the distance between the bottom corner of the phone (where it's held in the hand) and the top opposite corner of the screen, not the top corner of the phone. That's because that point is the furthest you'd ever need to stretch your thumb to use the phone. So actually, the displays getting bigger as the bezels get smaller has been part of the problem.
If you look at the Nexus 5X [1] you'll see that it has an enormous (by modern standards) top bezel. By comparison, a phone like the S22 has basically no bezel at all and will be much harder to use one-handed.
However, in practice 'not being able to reach the whole screen with my thumb' hasn't turned out to be a big problem: navigation elements at the top of the screen tend to be less-used (as app devs also take into account that it's a hassle to reach them). If I really need to use them one-handed, I can always 'scoot' my hand up a bit. (I can see how this is harder if you have smaller hands, though.)
A larger screen also actually turns out to be quite nice, as more content fits on it (I'm actually writing this comment on my phone).
If that's true, then app devs are thoroughly incompetent at it. Take a look at at Chrome on Android. The address bar, tab menu, and settings bar are all at the top of the screen. In 2021, Apple made the same change for Safari, moving the address bar from the bottom of the screen to the top [1]. The tab grid Chrome's push for tab grid [2] made it even worse, because depending on the tab, you may need to reach across the entire diagonal the reach the tab you want. Firefox has the option of putting the address bar at the bottom (and if so, the tabs show near the bottom as well), but the navigation buttons for bookmarks are near the top of the screen.
I don't think mobile developers think about one-handed phone use at all. Based on the designs used, with interactions bouncing all around the screen, it doesn't seem to be a concern at all. Perhaps they assume that everybody holds a phone with one hand and then touches the screen with the other hand.
[0] https://images.idgesg.net/images/article/2022/02/05-chrome-a...
[1] https://9to5mac.com/2021/08/17/ios-15-beta-6-redesigns-safar...
[2] https://m-cdn.phonearena.com/images/articles/372064-940/Scre...
