USB-C is getting standardized everywhere now

3.5 mm has been a standard from the motherfisting 1950s

I haven’t seen a single phone that has more than one USB-C port, and I would like to listen to stuff while these these phones charge their miniscule batteries.

because it’s already compatible with everything

i have a cheap pair of earphones in my pocket (which i’m prepared to lose). another by the door. a more expensive set of headphones upstairs. a speaker in the kitchen. and when i get in a friend’s car or go to their house, i can just plug my phone in and it works without the aggravation of having to pair to their speaker

tell me, oh “you can just buy a dongle” people, what am i supposed to do? buy one and accept that i’ll lose it all the time? buy 5 and keep one plugged into every 3.5mm i own and don’t own?

plus, y’know - takes slightly more battery, hassle to pair, can’t charge and use dongle, all the other obvious issues

1. I have aux earphones and it needs to work with some extension on new phones.
2. Earphone while charging
3. Enabling OTG for usb eaphone

It seems like you are assuming that the only device that I want to use headphones with is my phone.

I’m a musician. I’ve got tons of audio equipment I’ve accumulated over decades, most of which use a typical analog headphone jack. So if I fully switched to USB-C or Bluetooth headphones, I would need to get a powered adapter of some kind that would then digitize what likely would have been a purely analog signal up until that point, just so it can be re-converted back to analog.

Or I could have sperate headphones just for my phone. Which seems silly.

So I took the 3rd option: got a phone with a headphone jack. The Xperia still has a micro SD card too.

Also I have dabbled in soldering circuits and doing basic repairs. I can easily replace most analog jacks and repair most cables. USB C… It’s possible, and I will try to learn to work with it eventually, but it’s always going to be more annoying to work with because it has many more, smaller pins.

I love USB-C for charging and data and display. But it does not replace 3.5mm. Aside from the things mentioned so far in the comments here, a fundamental problem is that now headphones need DACs in them.

The engineering specification states that an analog headset shall not use a USB-C plug instead of a 3.5 mm plug. In other words, headsets with a USB-C plug should always support digital audio (and optionally the accessory mode)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB-C#Audio_Adapter_Accessory_Mode

That increases the cost of headphones and introduces a point of failure and makes things more complicated for the end user. It’s just not worth it.

Because it needs an extra dongle that isn’t free and most headphones use an ordinary audio jack.

Charging while listening.

And above all, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

1. USB headphones require new drivers constantly.
2. USB headphones are likely to use proprietary apps for basic features like noise cancellation.
3. Audio jacks use significantly less power/processing compared to USB.
4. Audio jacks do not hog usb bus lanes, which may or may not be an issue for mobile, but on PC it is.
5. USB headphones are in general significantly lower quality, because studio equipment uses 3.5mm or other standard jacks (XLR for microphones for example) as they cause the lowest interference.
6. USB introduces overhead latency which is a no-go for production use.

When companies began to drop the audio jack I was annoyed, but I figured I could just buy a converter. Which would be great if there were a universal standard for connecting audio through a USB C. There isn’t. There aren’t even just two competing approaches. There are all kinds of different setups that sometimes vary even within a single brand.

I found multiple adapter that said it supported my phone brand. It didn’t work. I looked deeper and found some advice on adapters that would work with more recent phone. I bought one based on that and it worked, sort of. The audio quality was not great and it would occasionally just cut out for a second. My third try got me an adapter that work reliably, but the audio quality is still mediocre. My best headphones are all analog, but I have to use Bluetooth with my phone because it provides better audio.

The physical issues, particularly the connectors, guarantees that USB C will never work as well. The lack of standards for implementing it make finding compatible hardware a nightmare. And if you manage to get everything else figured out you end up with the kind of sound you can hear from an audio jack using a $5 set of earbuds. It provides no benefits to the user, only to the manufacturer.

I have multiple dozens of headphones that have a normal headphone plug.

I can charge my phone while I listen to headphones without carrying multiple adapters.

We can maybe talk once we get more than 1 USB c connector on a phone. Maybe.

I need a special adapter to charge my phone simultaneously

Also, I can’t connect it without an adapter to my car, my headphones or my home cinema stereo

It requires extra hardware to get the same functionality I’d have by having a traditional jack.

Also the excuses these companies make up for removing it are always silly. No, the phone isn’t too thin to have one* – that’s always marketing BS. It’s always, always, always to save the pennies it costs to add a headphone jack. Those pennies of course add up during manufacturing.

They can save costs in that way because some people don’t care. It makes a simple headphone jack seem like a nothing feature, and the narrative can be pushed that those who want it are simply latching on to the past. Something similar happens with the arguments for and against physical buttons vs. touch screens, especially in cars.

*there is a YouTube video (I believe by Strange Parts) where they add a headphone jack to an iPhone which Apple had explicitly claimed was too thin to have one.

There are way more aux jack headphones out there, and you don’t want your very high quality headphones suddenly be forced to be considered obsolete just because tech companies feel like selling a different product.

Because I can’t charge my phone and use the headphones at the same time. Only 1 USB-C port on my phone.

Because it sucks and the 3.5mm jack is better. Manufacturers should be forced to include it or pay a punitive fee calculated to far outweigh the savings of not including the jack, perhaps $5,000 per individual unit manufactured.