Why INDIA should enforce 3 year warrenty on smartphone’s

financialexpress.com

Edit:

India is becoming the dumping ground and cash cow for the cheap and unethical smartphone manufacturer.
The hardware sold is not up to the mark, it also contains a lot of pre-loaded apps that make the phone very cumbersome to use and the cherry on the top is that they display Advertisement on phone. Even the apps that contain ads in the play-store are notified that this app contains ads, but these phone manufacturer doesn’t even bother you to tell that they display ads.

India is the second-largest market for a smartphone, it estimated smartphone user to be 442 million by 2022.

Around 40% of people(smartphone owners) want to change their phone’s within the year, and 55% of consumers think the key driver to update is to stay updated with the latest technology.

In INDIA 95% of users are on the android platform and 3% of users are on ios platform, and almost all smartphone vendors(android) provide software updates for 1 to 2 years at max even flagship smartphone provides at max 3 years of the software update cycle, for ios(Apple) it provides 4 to 5 year’s of update cycle but its priced at very high range,

Due to not getting OS update after a year or two, the smartphone gets outdated, The users will have the surge of buying the new one, And you need to be on the recent OS to get the latest applications and get the most out of your smartphone.

So you will think what’s stopping the smartphone vendor for providing the software(OS and security) update? while our old personal computer can run the operating system from the window’s 98 to the latest Windows 10 or can run any Linux distribution, Why can’t the smartphones can get updates for at least 3 years, Why are they are making the life cycle of the smartphone so small.

Similarly, the repairability index of the recent smartphone is going down, the cost of repairing the smartphone is greater than buying a new one.

So by the above argument, we can summarise the above paragraph as the smartphone vendors want or enforcing us to buy a new smartphone every year or two.

The real cost of buying a new smartphone:-

1. Data Privacy — Selling an old smartphone has become much more lucrative, due to exchange programs on the e-commerce platforms. However, there is always the risk of your private data been recovered and sold on the dark web at a very low cost which contains your photos, contacts, documents, etc.
2. Environmental Cost — India currently doesn’t have the proper infrastructure to dispose of electronics waste.
3. Economy Drawback — Almost every smartphone vendor is of foreign countries, even if they are manufacturing phones in India their R&D and other materials depend on others. We don’t want to become the consumer-based economy, do we?.
4. Right to Repair — I am quoting ifixt.com here.
   “Product that can be repaired should be repaired, Refurbished cell phone can be sold to someone new, Even better repair jobs are local”
   So if we have a phone with 3 years OS update & warrenty, our second-hand market will grow.
   Also repairing older phones creates local jobs.
   Instead of throwing old phones people will repair them.

“The Best phone is the one you already own”