For about a decade, fixing a phone has been getting quietly harder. Manufacturers locked spare parts to specific serial numbers, glued batteries deeper into chassis, and made calibration tools available only to "authorised" service partners. The drift was towards a world where third-party repair was technically still legal but practically impossible.
That trend is about to bend the other way.
What's actually happening
The EU Right to Repair Directive (Directive (EU) 2024/1799) was adopted in mid-2024 and becomes enforceable in the second half of 2026 — i.e. now-ish. Mobile phones are explicitly named in scope, alongside batteries for e-scooters and e-bikes, washing machines, and a list of other product groups.
Three rules matter for phones:
- Manufacturers must keep spare parts available for up to 10 years after a model is launched. Not just to authorised partners — to anyone, at "reasonable" prices.
- Repair manuals and technical documentation must be published, again accessible to independent repair shops and consumers, not just gated to a paid network.
- A repairability score has to be visible at point of sale, so before you buy you'll see how easy a particular phone will be to fix in three years' time.
There's a fourth, subtler rule: manufacturers must offer a repair if a defect appears after the statutory warranty period, unless repair is genuinely impossible. They can't just push you towards a replacement to keep the product cycle moving.
"But the UK left the EU"
We did, and on paper this directive doesn't bind UK lawmakers. In practice it'll reshape the UK market anyway, because:
- Almost every phone sold in the UK is also sold across the EU, on the same supply chain. Apple, Samsung, Google, Xiaomi and the rest aren't going to run two separate parts-availability programmes.
- The same ten-year parts stock that EU regulators force into existence will be the stock UK shops draw from too.
- Pressure for UK-equivalent legislation has been building. The House of Commons Library's Right to Repair briefing has been tracking this since 2022, and consumer groups have been louder this year specifically because of the EU deadline.
So even without a UK directive, the practical effect is that phones sold from autumn 2026 onwards should be substantially easier — and cheaper — to fix.
What it means at the bench
For a small repair facility like ours, the directive is mostly good news.
- Parts become more reliably available, which means fewer "we'd love to fix this but Apple won't sell us the part" conversations.
- Diagnostic tools that have been gated to "authorised service providers" should open up. Apple already started this in April 2024 by allowing used genuine parts in repairs and moving calibration on-device.
- Repairability scores mean we'll be able to look at a customer's new phone and tell them honestly: this one is going to be easy to keep running, this one is going to be a nightmare. That's information you can't easily get today.
The thing the directive does not fix is parts pairing — the practice where a screen, battery or camera is software-bound to a specific phone, and a swap triggers warning messages even when the part is genuine. That's still legal, and the EU's own analysis singled it out as something the next round of rules will need to address.
What you can do now
Honestly, not much specifically — this is regulation working in the background. But two things worth knowing:
- If you're due an upgrade, look at the repairability score when it appears on labels later this year. A higher score will save you money over the phone's lifetime.
- If a manufacturer or "authorised" repair centre tells you a fix isn't possible after the warranty period, ask whether the directive applies and what the repairability documentation says. From this autumn onwards, "you'll just have to buy a new one" stops being a defensible answer for most defects.
We'll keep watching what actually lands when, and report back when we see real changes coming through the parts catalogues.