- iFixit and Samsung are ending their partnership on a direct-to-consumer phone repair program.
- iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens says “Samsung does not seem interested in enabling repair at scale” and that the deal is not working due to high parts prices and difficulty of repairs.
- Samsung only ships batteries pre-glued to the phone screen, forcing customers to pay over $160 even for just a battery replacement, unlike with other vendors.
- The contract also limited iFixit to selling no more than 7 parts per customer in a 3-month period, hampering their ability to support local repair shops.
- Additionally, Samsung required iFixit to share customer email addresses and purchase history, which iFixit does not do with other partners.
- iFixit says it will continue to stock aftermarket Samsung parts and publish repair guides, but will no longer work directly with Samsung on official repair manuals.
iFixit says:
We clearly didn’t learn our lesson the first time, and let them convince us they were serious about embracing repair.
We tried to make this work. Gosh, we tried. But with such divergent priorities, we’re no longer able to proceed.
Man, I’m glad I bought a Murena Fairphone.
I am 1000% asking Lemmy where to buy my next phone. It’ll take some setup but Stallman will be proud.
I don’t think Stallman would be proud of anything Android, and certainly not something that the user can’t update outside of the manufacturer updates. Pretty much everything has a locked down BIOS, and you can’t really modify the OS yourself.
I’m using a Pixel (bad) with GrapheneOS (good), so I think Stallman would be a little happier, but he’d probably still prefer something like a Pinephone, which I think has a project to open up the modem.