The EU demands repairable smartphones and eternal updates!

What is this new legislation?

It is not yet strictly speaking a law, but the Commission has drawn up a project in which she suggests forcing all mobile phone manufacturers to extend the availability of updates. It proposes that these “updates” be available at least 5 years after the marketing of the devices and accessible within two months of their design by Google for all compatible devices. Most of the time, these security patches are no longer issued after 2 or 3 years and they sometimes take several months before being available (see where you are on your device by doing Settings>System>System update Where About phone)

But the law Project goes even further: it proposes to oblige all manufacturers in the smartphone industry to market spare parts for a minimum period of five years following the date of the end of the marketing of the model. It counts more than 15 categories of accessories affected by this new measure: such as screens, batteries, microphones, speakers, cameras or even hinges for foldable phones.

Why put in place such a guarantee?

A Arcep report of July 2021 estimates that the average duration of use of a smartphone is only two to three years. The objective of this bill is of course to allow European consumers to keep their telephones longer by extending the average lifespan of the devices and by promoting the replacement of spare parts.

Some brands like Samsung already offer a similar warranty on some devices on recent high-end smartphones. But this is not the case with other manufacturers like Oppo or Xiaomi.

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If this new regulation is adopted, all manufacturers of electronic gadgets will have to comply with it. It is very likely that these changes will affect other geographic markets. Considerable changes in the smartphone industry are therefore to be expected over the next two years.

What impact will these measures have on selling prices? We ignore it.