This decision was promptly copied by every other major phone manufacturer, for the same reasons Apple made the decision. The 3.5mm jack is obsolete and getting rid of it enables a better, tougher device which is more waterproof.
The largest non-Apple player in the industry, Samsung, continues to ship flagship phones with a 3.5mm jack and with waterproofing that has been consistently ahead of the iPhone. Samsung Galaxy has been IP68 since the S7 in 2016. Something the iPhone didn't achieve until the XS & XS Max.
The idea that this was about waterproofing is a fabrication.
It blows my mind how people call things obsolete without replacing all of their functionality. The only reason the 3.5mm jack is considered obsolete is because Apple said so. Literally nobody had any problem with it existing up until the day Apple announced that iphone. If this isn't the definition of sheeple then I don't know what it is.
Its not obselete when 100s of millions of people use it everyday and the replacement is expensive, needs replacing because the batteries die and has poorer sound quality.
No phone is more waterproof with it than without (they all have complex data ports with many connection vs three or four in a jack). No phone has a bigger battery. No phone is tougher.
It allows Apple and others to sell expensice Bluetooth ear buds.
Most milspec phones have been waterproof for a long time. Kyocera has a group of phone models (named Hydro) that are/were waterproof, although they aren't very impressive or popular, and rely on caps with gaskets.
Apple is a trendsetter and nobody can deny that. That doesn’t make the headphone jack an anti feature. I use a 6S to this day when I could get a XS, for the headphone jack and smaller size/weight.
It was also recently reversed by Google for the Pixel 3a. I'm hoping other manufacturers follow suit. It's fine to admit a mistake and many have been made in phone design recently.
I guess it's not as super obvious as it sounds, but if you take a look at a 3.5mm audio jack, it's not that hard to imagine creating a hermetically sealed (and therefore waterproof) female plug for that specification.
