Right-to-Repair Scores by Brand: How Apple, Samsung, and Fairphone Actually Compare
"Right to repair" has become shorthand for a set of legal rules, but independent repairability scoring predates most of that legislation and still tells you more about what actually happens when your phone breaks. iFixit has scored teardown repairability for over a decade, and independent advocacy groups like US PIRG now publish annual brand-level report cards that go beyond any single model. Put those together and a clear hierarchy emerges — one that does not always match how "green" or "premium" a brand's marketing suggests.
Fairphone: the outlier built entirely around repair
Fairphone is the reference point every other brand gets measured against. Its phones, from the Fairphone 2 in 2015 through the current Fairphone 6 generation, have consistently earned perfect or near-perfect iFixit scores. The company designs around modularity from the start: a Fairphone owner can replace the battery, display, cameras, and even the USB-C port as individual modules, using ordinary screwdrivers rather than heat guns and solvents, because the company avoids the glue and adhesive assembly that dominates mainstream flagship construction. Fairphone also sells replacement parts directly to consumers rather than routing every repair through an authorized service network, which is the single biggest structural difference between its approach and everyone else's on this list. The trade-off is that Fairphone devices are not sold through major US carriers and skip the top-tier camera and chipset specs that flagship buyers expect, so the perfect repairability score comes bundled with a different set of compromises.
Apple and Samsung: further along than a few years ago, still near the bottom
Apple's repairability trajectory has actually improved in measurable ways — the shift to a more serviceable back-glass design starting in 2022 moved iPhone scores from roughly a 4 out of 10 average in earlier generations up toward a 6 out of 10 by the iPhone 16 generation. That is real progress, but it still leaves Apple ranked at or near the bottom of the US PIRG's most recent brand report card, which graded the company a D-minus overall for repairability practices — a score shaped as much by parts-pairing policies and diagnostic software restrictions as by the physical teardown difficulty of any single device. Samsung sits just above Apple in that same report card at a D grade, and its flagship Galaxy S line has held a steadier but still middling 4 out of 10 iFixit score across recent generations, with Phillips-head screws instead of proprietary fasteners as one of its few consistent repair-friendly traits. Both companies now publish official self-repair manuals and sell some parts directly, which is a meaningful shift from a decade ago, but neither has restructured its hardware design around repairability the way Fairphone has.
What "parts pairing" actually means for repair scores
Physical teardown difficulty is only half of what independent repairability scores measure. The other half, increasingly weighted more heavily in recent US PIRG and iFixit methodology, is software-level parts pairing — a practice where a phone's firmware checks whether a replacement part (a battery, a screen, a camera module) is cryptographically "paired" to that specific device, and disables features or throws persistent warnings if it detects a part that was not installed through an authorized channel. A screen replaced by an independent repair shop might work perfectly but permanently flag a warning, or lose access to features like True Tone color matching, purely because of how the software treats the swap rather than any functional defect. This is the practice that regulation like the EU's rules has increasingly targeted, since it can make a phone that scores reasonably well on physical teardown difficulty still function poorly for independent repair in practice.
How this compares to the EU's regulatory approach
Independent scoring and government regulation are related but distinct forces pushing in the same direction. Our earlier coverage of the EU's right-to-repair rules for phone batteries covers the legislative side specifically — mandated minimum charge-cycle durability, easier user battery replacement, and parts-availability windows written into law rather than left to a company's voluntary policy. Brand-level repairability scores from groups like iFixit and US PIRG exist partly because that kind of regulation has been slow and geographically uneven; a scoring system that updates with every new phone generation captures shifts in company behavior faster than legislation can, and applies pressure through public comparison rather than legal mandate. The two approaches reinforce each other in practice — regulatory deadlines tend to correlate with manufacturers making genuine design changes that then show up as improved scores the following year.
Independent repair shops and the score gap
A brand's repairability score also predicts, fairly reliably, how independent repair shops treat that brand's devices. Our related piece on what you actually give up choosing an independent repair shop over manufacturer-authorized service is worth reading alongside this one, since a phone with a high iFixit score and minimal parts pairing — again, largely the Fairphone case — tends to have a much smaller practical gap between independent and authorized repair quality, while a phone near the bottom of the repairability rankings often pushes owners toward authorized service almost by design, regardless of cost.
Why this should factor into a purchase decision
Repairability scores rarely make it into a buying decision the way camera megapixels or battery capacity do, but they arguably matter more over a phone's full ownership life. A device that scores well is cheaper and faster to fix when a screen cracks or a battery ages out, extends the phone's useful life, and reduces electronic waste — a connection we explore further in our look at the carbon footprint of a smartphone, where a large share of a phone's lifetime environmental impact comes from manufacturing a replacement rather than repairing the one you already own. The practical takeaway for 2026: Fairphone remains the only mainstream brand built around genuine modular repairability, Samsung and Apple have both made real but incremental progress while still trailing badly on independent report cards, and parts-pairing software policy now matters as much to a real-world repair score as how many screws hold the case together. Anyone buying a phone with the intention of keeping it for four or five years should weigh brand-level repairability scores the same way they would weigh software-update commitments — as a long-term cost, not a launch-day spec.