(3) is interesting, but when you are the phone manufacturer that has to be so easy to mitigate:
- slow = notification with "slow photo write to SD card, use a better SD card for better performance"
- failure = they could offer a built-in app with reliability stats for the SD card currently inserted
At Samsung's size and amount of money to solve these problems, the skeptic in me feels like (3) is a convenient excuse for (1), or to excuse just copying what Apple does.
Your suggestion feels like a lot more work and effort that still leads to terrible UX, slow phones and unhappy customers.
1. Customers being nagged their SD card is slow will hate the phone, not just the SD card they just bought and can't return. How will the users know which cards are fast enough? Most average users are not tach savvy at all and are easily duped by marketing fluff.
2. SD cards can also die out of the blue. Good luck trying to predict when with an app. You might as well just offer them data recovery services while you're at it for when they loose all their photos.
It's easier to just skip SD cards and offer fast and solid UFS storage at a higher cost, that you can vouch for, instead of something that could always be flaky for reasons outside of your control.
Assuming the average user wants to look at apps or believe the phone sure. If not there's no winning here and I can see why making it so the user just can't mess up on choosing storage and doesn't have to be presented all this information/responsibility when they do is still a much better image of the phone's storage quality.
Doesn't mean it's any less aligned with getting to charge more for storage. Just means it can still make plenty of sense as an excuse. Power users have consistently turned out to be a poor target for phone makers.
- slow = notification with "slow photo write to SD card, use a better SD card for better performance"
- failure = they could offer a built-in app with reliability stats for the SD card currently inserted
At Samsung's size and amount of money to solve these problems, the skeptic in me feels like (3) is a convenient excuse for (1), or to excuse just copying what Apple does.