This is about the same size as a 5.5" Android phone.

Seems like the only performant and small (sub 5.5") Android phones are usually Japanese and hard to come by, at least in Europe. I have seen a couple of them which looked great (Kyocera and Sharp, I think) but I don't feel brave enough to order them.

This is what I was about to say, because I remember the first SE. Then I went checking the specifications and I was a little disappointed

Width: 2.65 inches (67.3 mm)

Height: 5.45 inches (138.4 mm)

Depth: 0.29 inch (7.3 mm)

Weight: 5.22 ounces (148 grams)

This is only a little smaller than my Samsung A40, which is 2.72 x 5.69 x 0.31 in (69.2 x 144.4 x 7.9 mm) and weights less than the SE (4.94 oz - 140 g).

Furthermore the A40 has almost no bezel and this iPhone has a lot of it at the top and bottom of the screen. The screen of the A40 is so large that I wish I could cut a couple of cm off it. It would be large enough, fit better in pockets and weight less.

I currently use the xz2 compact and am happy with it, but I'm not sure what I'll do when it dies.

I'm using the Galaxy 10e and it's fantastic. I like the size, the cameras and the headphone jack :)

There's plenty of decent small Android phones. The problem is that they run Android.

No, there really aren't. Trust me, I spent days researching this and ended up with the Pixel 3A phablet that I hate. There are exactly zero decent Android phones <= 4.7".

And in the past year, there were precisely 2 Android phones with <= 4.7" screens. Lava Z40 and BLU Advance L5. There were zero that were as narrow as the original SE.

Same thing could be said about iphones, they make decent hardware, the problem is that they run ios.

Could you please list them? I don't see any modern Android phone of the size iphone 5. All androids are huge, even compared with iphone 8.

Or that they don't run real Android but some lagging downstream vendor-specific bloatware...

Personal preference is not a reason to post unhelpful comments. This isn't reddit.

Edit : typo

It's a pretty objective fact at this point that Android has more lag, is less secure, and has a worse app store than iOS. Practically the only reason anyone uses it is price.