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.
Makes sense because google certainly doesn’t support their own shit lol
As a former Pixelbook user, I agree 100%. A firmware update crippled my touchscreen, and the touchscreens of quite a few other users, from the look of their support forum.
Rather than investigate and issue a fix (which they haven’t in years, also according to their support form), they literally told me to buy a new laptop. WTF?
Well, I sure did. I got a Framework. Now I can fix it whenever I want with ease, and with every part readily available, too!
Thanks, Google!
The constant multi-year tide of Pixel support and RMA horror stories helped push me into getting an iPhone
I remember back in /r/Pixel on Reddit that Google had a mid tier or higher customer service rep in the subreddit. Why? Because their regular customer service sucked so bad they needed someone in /r/Pixel to do damage control. If a person wasn’t in the subreddit, they’d basically be left twisting in the wind.
I had my OG Pixel XL get compromised and my Google account stolen. Asking to get it back was basically “Fill out this form and we might get back to you at some point. You won’t receive any communications from us except to tell you your account has been recovered. And there’s no way for you to talk to a real human.”
🤔 What’s really going on? Very time I see a big company back something good. I get a funny feeling.
https://lemmy.world/post/10678878
here you go. This is why you get funny feelings.
Companies see the writing on the wall with all the right to repair legislation going around, so they’re trying to make themselves look good now instead of fighting it anymore. At least publicly.
Enemy of my enemy is my friend
Android has always been easier to repair, apple is notoriously against repair.
Force policy to cut out a large portion of your competition’s revenue strategy (Apple authorized repair only)
That’s a Samsung S4 in the stock photo. Those things were like Lego, I used to have a few that I’d swap out parts to keep running. I changed out screens, charging ports, cameras. And you could swap batteries on the fly. Those were better times.
i’m just gonna leave this here:
TLDW: They are basically advocating for selling assemblies of parts for “user safety”. So for example, if one chip on a motherboard was broken, instead of selling the individual part, they want to sell you the entire board with all the other parts attached (which can cost nearly as much as the device was new).
Video also highlights how you can buy a device cheaper than the cost of buying a genuine part from the manufacturer.
Google are grabbing good PR headlines with backing one complaint point in the right to repair scene, but then also backing a bunch of anti-repairability in the rest of their post, neatly snuggled away in a bunch of corpo talk bullshittery.
That was my sentiment exactly. The benefits of being able to buy parts to fix a device is more muted when the replacement part cost the same as a buying an entire used phone. Maybe I’m in the dark, but the cost of screens feels inflated and like a deterrent to fixing devices, in spite of it being likely the leading reason for repairs.
I mean it’s better than nothing. Hopefully it leads to more economical repair kits. On a personal note, of the repair required soldering chips onto/off the board I would much rather buy a working board then try to replace a single chip.
Sure, but most people wouldn’t even want to attempt a board replacement and would rather take it to a repair shop. Replacing an entire section of a device because one tiny part is broken is not helping the e-waste problem repairability is trying to work on.
These companies just want to upsell you to a new device, they want to group parts into assemblies to increase the price, and if the repair is going to cost just a small amount less than buying a new device, people are likely just to buy a new one, now that old device becomes e-waste and the company made a sale. Instead of it being a cheap repair, keeping that device going for as long as possible.
I’m just gonna not click the random link you left here with zero explanation.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/rV5bBSZX00E
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Until they publish the schematics and drivers for device components for usage in making the device software last as long as possible, those are just empty words. Yeah, sure I can finally replace the broken camera sensor, as I should be able for years, but I must buy whole another phone if I want something slightly different in the OS image.
Backing the legislation forcing them to do just that isn’t entirely vapid. I mean, I’m not counting on them completely, but it is a step in the right direction.
Problem is I imagine a lot of their hardware is under NDA so they’re unable to. I appreciate what they’re trying to do but a lot of hardware companies sadly won’t allow them to publish a lot of things. I do wish there was more open-source hardware (and I say that as a huge open-source advocate)
Companies like Fairphone would love to open their drivers so distros like PostmarketOS could add support that then mainline Linux can be ported. But they can’t somehow.
I guess Apple would have a much better time in that having their own design and being much bigger in influence.
You are allowed to unlock the bootloader and install a custom ROM though, so at least once my Pixel 6 Pro is out of support I can flash lineage or graphene onto my phone
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.
