In July 2021, the EU passed a law requiring manufacturers to provide spare parts and repair documentation for major household appliances. It was a start. Last year, the Right to Repair Directive expanded to cover smartphones and tablets, with full enforcement kicking in across EU member states in 2026. If you live in Europe and your phone needs a new battery, manufacturers are now legally required to make that possible without voiding your warranty or forcing you to buy a new device.
This sounds obvious. It is not obvious. For the past decade, getting a phone repaired meant either paying the manufacturer’s own repair service at manufacturer prices, finding a third-party shop that may or may not use genuine parts, or replacing the device entirely. The choice was designed to be painful. That was the point.
How Phone Repair Got Broken on Purpose
The story of repair-hostile design is mostly a story about Apple, but it is not exclusively about Apple. Starting with the iPhone 4, Apple began gluing components together and moving to proprietary screws that required special tools. The iPhone 7 removed the headphone jack and also glued the battery in place. Later models moved to software pairing: even if you bought a genuine Apple battery from a third party and installed it correctly, the phone would display a warning message saying the battery was not genuine, and Face ID might stop working.
This is called parts pairing. The phone’s software checks whether the component’s serial number matches an Apple-authorized record. If it doesn’t, you get degraded functionality or warning messages, even if the part works perfectly. It is not a safety feature. It is a lock-in mechanism.
Samsung did the same with some Galaxy displays. John Deere did it with tractors. Medical device manufacturers did it with insulin pumps and ventilators. The agricultural and medical versions attracted more press attention, but the consumer electronics problem was the same: companies designed products to fail in ways that made independent repair effectively impossible.
What the EU Law Actually Requires
The Right to Repair Directive requires manufacturers to provide spare parts for a minimum of five to seven years after a product goes on sale. It requires those parts to be available to independent repair shops, not just authorized service centers. It bans software restrictions that prevent functional repairs from working, which means parts pairing practices are now illegal in the EU for covered product categories.
It also introduces a “right to repair score” concept, where products must disclose their repairability on a standardized scale. France implemented a version of this before the EU directive, and the results were useful: you can now compare phones partly on how easy they are to fix, which is information that did not exist in the consumer market before.
Manufacturers are also required to offer repairs at “reasonable cost.” The law does not define exactly what reasonable means, which will be tested in courts over the next few years. But the direction is clear: you cannot charge three times the cost of a new device to replace a battery in a device that is two years old.
The US Situation Is More Complicated
The United States does not have a federal right to repair law for electronics. Some states have passed their own versions. California, Colorado, Minnesota, and New York have repair laws that cover certain categories of electronics and appliances, with varying degrees of enforcement and scope.
The patchwork nature of US law means that manufacturers sometimes apply EU-level policies globally, because designing two different product lines is expensive. Apple, under pressure from both legislation and a Federal Trade Commission report that called repair restrictions anti-competitive, began selling parts and repair tools to individuals through its Self Service Repair program in 2022. The tools and parts are priced at levels that still make professional repair more cost-effective for most people, and the program does not cover all models, but it exists. It did not exist before the legislative pressure started.
iFixit, the company that publishes free repair guides for thousands of devices, tracks repairability and has been a central voice in the right to repair movement for years. Their teardown scores correlate with legislation: as repair laws tighten, new device designs start getting better scores. The same economic logic that drives software pricing changes applies to hardware: when the regulatory environment changes, companies adapt.
The Environmental Argument
A new smartphone requires roughly 70 kilograms of raw material to manufacture. That includes rare earth metals, cobalt (much of it mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo under conditions that would not pass any Western labor audit), and complex supply chains that span four or five continents. The carbon footprint of manufacturing a new phone is between 40 and 80 kilograms of CO2 equivalent, depending on the model.
A battery replacement adds maybe a few hundred grams to that number. Extending a phone’s useful life by two years by replacing the battery rather than buying a new device is not a small environmental win. It’s a 50 to 70 percent reduction in the device’s total lifecycle carbon impact. The right to repair is not just a consumer rights issue. It is an environmental policy with teeth.
Europe generates about 11 million tons of electronic waste per year. The US generates about 6.9 million tons. Only 17 percent of global e-waste gets formally recycled. The rest ends up in landfills in developing countries, where informal recycling operations expose workers to lead, mercury, and cadmium. Making devices repairable is the fastest way to reduce that number without requiring consumers to change their behavior dramatically.
What You Can Do Right Now
If you’re in the EU, your phone manufacturer is now legally required to provide spare parts. If you need a battery replacement, get one through an independent shop and know that the software cannot legally penalize you for it. If the manufacturer gives you a warning message for using a genuine replacement battery, that is a legal violation under the directive, not just bad customer service.
If you’re buying a new phone, check iFixit’s repairability score before you buy. The Fairphone series consistently scores near perfect on repairability. It’s designed to be disassembled with standard tools, and replacement parts are sold directly on the manufacturer’s website. It’s not the most powerful phone available, but it’s the one most likely to still be running in five years if you take care of it.
The average person replaces their phone every two to three years. The hardware often has three to four more years of functional life remaining. The constraint is usually software support, battery degradation, or screen damage. All of those are now fixable by law in most of Europe, and increasingly fixable by market pressure in the US. The push toward owning things rather than renting access to them extends to the physical devices in your pocket. Sometimes it takes a genuinely absurd situation before lawmakers act. In this case, it was farmers who couldn’t fix their own tractors that finally moved the needle. Better late than never.
Sources: EU Right to Repair analysis, Earth911 | iFixit Repairability Scores | European Commission Right to Repair Directive official text
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