The Android phone maker says go ahead, fix your own phone.
The right-to-repair movement continues to gain steam as another big tech company shows its support for letting people fix their own broken devices.
Google endorsed an Oregon right-to-repair legislation Thursday calling it a “common sense repair bill” and saying it would be a “win for consumers.” This marks the first time the Android phone maker has officially backed any right-to-repair law.
The ability to repair a phone, for example, empowers people by saving money on devices while creating less waste,” said Steven Nickel, devices and services director of operations for Google, in a blog post Thursday. “It also critically supports sustainability in manufacturing. Repair must be easy enough for anyone to do, whether they are technicians or do-it-yourselfers.”
In the Oregon repair bill, manufacturers will be required to provide replacement parts, software, physical tools, documentation and schematics needed for repair to authorized repair providers or individuals. The legislation covers any digital electronics with a computer chip although cars, farm equipment, medical devices, solar power systems, and any heavy or industrial equipment that is not sold to consumers are exempt from the bill.
Google has made strides in making its Pixel phones easier to fix. The company enabled a Repair Mode for the phones last month allowing the protection of data on the device while it’s being serviced. There’s also a diagnostic feature that helps determine if your Pixel phone is working properly or not. That said, Google’s Pixel Watch is another story as the company said in October it will not provide parts to repair its smartwatch.
Apple jumped on the right-to-repair bandwagon back in October. The iPhone maker showed its support for a federal law to make it easier to repair its phones after years of being a staunch opponent.
That’s really basic and not even the minimum for actual long-term support. Remember those ROMs needs to hack together pices of binary blobs and drivers scattered around stock ROM and do many patches. Basically any new Android version is doing the work once again, that LineageOS and other projects automated. And after the end of official updates they are stuck with untouchable firmware package.
What should be done is adding the support to the upstream Linux kernel itself. Like AMD and Intel are doing on desktops, thanks to that we can have almost lifetime updates, multiple choices of OSes and have one image for all devices instead of doing seperate builds. Or at least provide documentation and drivers so the community can do it.
Don’t get me wrong it’s not perfect and I 100% agree with what you’re saying, but it is vastly better compared to some other OEMs (Samsung comes to mind) who uses shit like e-fuses to make sure your phone is never able to use a banking app again or the multiple companies that don’t let you unlock the bootloader at all.
Recently I read that Xiaomi new “HyperOS” won’t allow bootloader unlock at all unless you have max level of support on their community forums and even then only 3 devices a year🤦