Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

This is pretty disgusting. If you take your Samsung phone into Bob's Cellphone Repair Emporium, you've just given ALL your information directly back to Samsung! Bob is contractually-bound by Samsung to provide, among other things, "customer’s address, email address, phone number, details about what is wrong with their phone, their phone’s warranty status, details of the customer’s complaint, and the device’s IMEI number, which is a unique device identifier". Among many other things. Doesn't matter whether or not you bought the phone direct from Samsung or from a third-party, or even used. Bob is required to upload this information daily to Samsung.

But that's not remotely the worst part.

Let's say you dropped your phone and broke the screen. You can get a genuine Samsung screen for, I don't know, $300 or so? Or you can get a generic screen which functionally is just as good for $150 or so. Maybe the color isn't as good, but it works pretty much as well.

If you take that phone, with third-party parts into Bob's, Bob is required to remove ALL non-Samsung parts and DESTROY them. It's in Bob's contract with Samsung. He can lose his contract with Samsung, and thus his access to Samsung parts, tools, and repair manuals if he doesn't do it. So now you have to pay even more money for that new battery to get your phone fully functional again.

https://www.404media.co/samsung-requires-independent-repair-shops-to-share-customer-data-snitch-on-people-who-use-aftermarket-parts-leaked-contract-shows/

https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/05/23/1849224/leaked-contract-shows-samsung-forces-repair-shop-to-snitch-on-customers


The second part is bad for people who like to DIY repairs. I've talked about iFixit before, in fact I just bought a new toolkit from them (20% off sales are attractive). Samsung and iFixit had a partnership going that supplied the latter with parts and all sorts of things from the former. Unfortunately, as the CEO of iFixit puts it, "Samsung's approach to repairability does not align with our mission."

From the story: “Samsung does not seem interested in enabling repair at scale,” Wiens [co-founder of iFixit] tells me, even though similar deals are going well with Google, Motorola, and HMD.

He believes dropping Samsung shouldn’t actually affect iFixit customers all that much. Instead of being Samsung's partner on genuine parts and approved repair manuals, iFixit will simply go it alone, the same way it's always done with Apple's iPhones.

While Wiens wouldn’t say who technically broke up with whom, he says price is the biggest reason the Samsung deal isn’t working: Samsung’s parts are priced so high, and its phones remain so difficult to repair, that customers just aren’t buying.

Most importantly, Samsung has only ever shipped batteries to iFixit that are preglued to an entire phone screen — making consumers pay over $160 even if they just want to replace a worn-out battery pack. That’s something Samsung doesn’t do with other vendors, according to Wiens. Meanwhile, iFixit’s iPhone and Pixel batteries cost more like $50."

https://www.theverge.com/samsung/2024/5/23/24162135/ifixit-end-samsung-repair-parts-deal

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/05/23/1528236/ifixit-is-breaking-up-with-samsung