Yeah but then you have to wade through a million crappy Chinese products and be thankful when they merely don't hold a charge (as opposed to exploding).

I've been through this back when batteries were replaceable, decent 3rd-party were not easy to find. Best you could hope for was that the original manufacturer kept making them. Nokia went as far as making one battery model work with multiple phone models.

Honest question, are phone batteries recycleable? Because if there's going to be a ton of them being made I have to wonder what's worst for the environment, replacing phones or replacing batteries.