Because we kept buying thinner and lighter phones, and gluing the battery in makes thinner and lighter phones with better battery life possible. As a convenient side effect glue creates a nice watertight seal that can make devices more water resistant.
I’ve only been on lemmy for like a week, so I have no point of comparison here. It doesn’t feel janky to me, but then I’m not a power user. It works well for what I like to do, which is view posts and comment. Images display well, I haven’t noticed any problems with video. I haven’t tried embedding images in comments yet, let’s try it with a photograph of the richest man in Indiana:
Give Thunder a second shot, or don’t. I’m not your boss, I’m just some drunk guy on the Internet.
Have you tried Thunder? I’ve been using it since I finally got around to moving over here (admittedly not very long) and I’ve found that Thunder gets a lot right. It’s open source, ad-free, cross-platform, and nice to use. It doesn’t have quite as much polish as Relay but the design language is similar enough that it doesn’t feel like a huge departure.
I imagine it’s a hell of a lot cheaper/simpler/more reliable in manufacturing to use the adhesive over screws, gaskets, and grease. It reduces both the BOM and the number of processes required to ship a unit, and probably fails less often, which means fewer RMAs. Plus it just plain takes up less space, which leaves more room for the battery.
I don’t like it, my favorite phone I’ve ever had was a Galaxy Nexus with a zerolemon battery that was bigger than the phone itself, but I can see why gluing everything together would be an attractive solution for the engineers who design these things.