GoKawiilApple and Samsung dominate the US phone market, and they’ve done so for years. Together with Google, they’ve shaped our sense of what a smartphone is and what it can do, pushing the boundaries of mobile photography, software, and processing power. But over the last few years, they’ve sat back, content to iterate rather than innovate — and in the interim, China’s tech giants have plowed ahead. Now a gulf is growing between the phones on sale in the US and those available in the rest of the world. US phone buyers are missing out.
Some of the blame for that gap lies with Apple. Where it goes, the market follows, and in recent years it’s gone slowly. But with new CEO John Ternus — a longtime hardware guy — ready to take the helm from this September’s iPhone 18 launch onwards, one can dream that Tim Cook’s cautious approach to iPhone spec updates might be behind us. If Ternus decides to pick up the pace, the rest of the US market might just follow.
US phones lag behind what’s on sale elsewhere in a whole host of ways, but the two big ones are cameras and batteries. The battery boost is a relatively recent phenomenon, the next step following years of Chinese phones offering faster and faster charging speeds (which still haven’t meaningfully reached the US). The bigger batteries are due to silicon-carbon cells, which use silicon to replace some of the graphite in a lithium battery’s anode. The resulting batteries are more energy-dense, allowing phones to fit much larger battery capacities into the same space. Regular-size phones have doubled in capacity over the last few years, while thin phones and foldables can now last longer than regular slab phones in the US — Honor’s Magic 8 Pro Air is almost as thin as Samsung’s Galaxy S25 Edge, but has a bigger battery than the S26 Ultra.
The Oppo Find X9 Ultra has a 7,050mAh battery and a 10x telephoto camera, and isn’t launching in the US. Photo: Dominic Preston / The Verge
So far, the triptych of Apple, Samsung, and Google haven’t announced any phones using silicon-carbon cells, nor has any of them said they plan to — though a handful of Motorola and OnePlus models have been released in the US using the chemistry. By contrast, every major Chinese Android manufacturer has adopted it.
Part of the slow US adoption may be down to long-term performance concerns. Silicon-carbon cells have the potential to lose total capacity more quickly over time, so a bigger battery on day one may not stay that way forever. Chinese phone manufacturers say they’ve found solutions to offset that issue, but we’ll only have proof once the first generation of silicon-carbon phones start to age. It won’t help that maintaining 80 percent battery capacity after five years is a key requirement to avoid having to shift to user-replaceable batteries under upcoming EU legislation, another reason manufacturers might be cautious about putting cells’ longevity at risk.
The Honor Robot Phone has an AI-enabled camera mounted on a gimbal, and isn’t launching in the US. Photo: Dominic Preston / The Verge
There are no such excuses for lagging so badly when it comes to cameras. While Apple, Google, and Samsung have each led the industry on phone photography at one point or another, it’s hard to argue that any of them is best-in-class any more. Successive iterative updates have led to phones releasing with years-old hardware. Samsung is worst of all: its S26 and S26 Plus cameras have scarcely changed since the S22.
The big Chinese companies see cameras as their main battleground. Each year their Ultra flagships push the boundaries of resolution, sensor size, and aperture, and those improvements quickly trickle down to lower price tiers. Partnerships with the likes of Zeiss, Leica, and Hasselblad include custom lenses, collaborative color tuning and film simulations, and camera-inspired designs for the phones themselves. Over the last few years that development has leaped outside of the phones and into accessories. First there were official camera grips that include two-stage shutter buttons, zoom wheels, and built-in batteries; now you can buy telephoto extenders that vastly extend the camera capabilities at range.
The Xiaomi 17 Ultra Leitzphone has a rotating camera ring for its continuous optical zoom lens, and isn’t launching in the US.
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