Motorola is partnering with iFixit to sell official DIY phone repair kits

Repairing a phone is harder than it needs to be. With phone manufacturers spending the last decade chasing device slimness and building devices meant to last however long a phone contract lasts, user repairability just doesn’t seem to be something they care much about. Need a repair part? Good luck on eBay, friendo!

In what might, maybe, hopefully be a sign of that tide changing, Motorola is now selling official repair kits in a partnership with iFixit.

You probably know iFixit as the folks that somehow manage to rip apart nearly every new popular device within hours of its release. Their deep gadget teardowns show you how the clocks tick and the silicon hamster wheels turn, allowing a peek inside while your own hard-earned gear stays in one happily functioning piece.

But they also sell a bunch of bits and bobs for when things stop working. They source tons of individual parts for repairing all sorts of devices, from aging iPods to console controllers. And now, for a handful of Motorola phones, they’re doing it with Motorola’s blessing.

They’ve just started shipping a handful of pre-assembled repair kits with replacement parts sourced straight from Motorola. At this point they’ve got kits for eight different phones (Moto Z, Moto X, Droid Turbo 2, Moto Z Play, Moto G5, Z Force, X Pure and G4 Plus). They’re focusing on the two biggest, most frequently replaced components — the battery and the screen — and each kit contains everything you need to get the phone apart, patched up and put back together. The battery replacement kits cost around $40, while the screen kits cost around $100-$200.

Will other manufacturers follow suit? It’s hard to say. But I’d sure hope so. With each subsequent generation of smartphone getting less and less enticing (“The camera is slightly better! The screen is… brighter? Harder? Faster? Stronger?”), it’d be great to see more of them embrace repair.

(Image source: iFixit’s Moto Z repair guide)