- 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.
At least from software point of view Google doesn’t make a fuss with the warranty if you unlock the bootloader of the phone, which can’t be said about Samsung (and good luck with Apple about that). It might not matter to the majority of users, but it matters to me.
In the EU at least Samsung can’t make a fuss either.
How’s that? As far as I know, once you trip Knox (which unlocking the bootloader does), you can’t restore the phone to factory state. Will they honour the warranty then?
IANAL: The short of it is that unless Samsung can prove that it’s the software’s fault that the malfunction is there, they have to repair it. A blown efuse is just as much proof as the ‘warranty broken if removed’ stickers, which is none.
There’s lot’s of cases online where Samsung/resellers try to stop people but as long as you are persistent and don’t just accept them not wanting to fix it they will repair it.
There’s also some cases of going through the small claims court to handle this (which doesn’t cost anything if you win) Small claims court
More about warranty
Also: This ONLY applies to the normal EU warranty which you always have, any extended warranty does not need to repair your device if you’ve rooted it.
You might be right (I hope you are), but it’s yet another gamble I’m not willing to take. Moreover, even if you don’t have to resort to warranty, you have limitations after you trip Knox if you change your mind or if you want to resell the device.