There was a time, when we had both... but somehow android phone manufacturers stopped being inventive and stopped making different phones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTC_Desire_Z <- this was an android phone with a keyboard, and far from the only one.

I remember these quite well. Their Achilles' heel was durability, a recurring problem with any smartphone design that has moving parts.

I think that if people kept buying these in significant enough numbers, manufacturers would still be making them.

But you're not given a choice at all. Look at sd card slots for example... cheap storage expansion, a standard not that long ago, but at one moment in time, pretty much all the flagship phones lost that feature. It wasn't an option, where you could buy a model without an sd card or one with the slot for $20 more, but the slot was gone, and the only phones with sd card slots were either old and shitty or some chinese noname store brand. Same for the headphone jack and user replacable batteries. If you wanted a fast phone with a good camera, you were stuck with either iphones, google nexus/pixel or samsungs (back then also sonys), and none of them have slots or jack ports anymore.

There was an in-between time when both were available, and the market spoke.

There are a lot of very vocal niches. I got real excited when Apple put out the iPhone 12 mini, I even bought one. But the rest of the market said no, and now there is no more Mini-sized iPhone. We may be noisy, but our niche is not large enough to sustain the devices we want.

As a side note, there are still good Android phones with expandable storage, they just aren't made by Google or Samsung. Sony still makes them.

I had the G1, and loved it, but I wanted that phone because it looked so much nicer.

A couple years before that the Blackberry 9900 added a touchscreen to their standard form factor and even without using the touch feature it was more than usable to browse the web on. The small click/touchpad was a delight to use.

And it wasn't enough to stop them from hemorrhaging customers. People wanted bigger screens with more rich UX. Dedicating so much real estate to a physical keyboard still harmed a ton of apps considerably compared to the 3.5" screens on iPhones of the time.

and people wanted the full keyboard, we were just in the minority.

Those phones were also the best MP3 players I ever owned - I had an iPod touch at the same time and the UX of copying over/selecting/playing music on that simply didn't compare.