This Month, EU’s New Smartphone Rules Will Evolve the Market

It's a pretty interesting situation, but in the last few years, the European Union has served as a pretty significant catalyst for consumer-focused changes in the smartphone industry. One of the biggest pointers to this was when the EU pushed to make Apple change from its annoying proprietary Lightning connector to USB-C, like everyone else.

Now, it is about to force smartphones sold in the EU to do a lot more. We've known about these new regulations for quite some time, but it is only now, as June has finally come around, that these regulations will actually take effect. Let's break it down and talk about what we can expect to change. And worry not; everything benefits us as consumers.

Starting June 20th, OEMs Will Have to Abide by the EU's New Rules for Smartphones and Tablets

The European Union has pushed smartphone OEMs to make numerous changes over the years, with Apple being a common target of its actions. However, the latest among these is a set of regulations that will hit all smartphone makers, as long as they plan to sell devices in the European Union.

These new regulations have been detailed before (and we'll get to them soon), but it is important to talk about them now as they'll be taking effect this month—on June 20th, to be exact. This new directive comes from the Energy Labelling and Ecodesign Regulation, and it'll bring the following consumer-positive changes to new devices released after June 20th:

• Support for at least five years' worth of OS upgrades, starting from the last day that the device officially retails. A lot of manufacturers might find this challenging. Essentially all OEMs calculate software support from the launch date, and some companies, such as Honor, don't even have phones with anything more than five years of support.
• Accidental drop and scratch resistance, as well as protection from dust and water. All of these are things that modern smartphones already support, even outside of the flagship category.
• Batteries must support at least 800 charge and discharge cycles, with at most 20% of capacity lost. I'm not sure how well current smartphone batteries hold up to this rule, but I'd assume pretty well, so OEMs might not need to make drastic changes in this regard.
• OEMs now need to provide access to key spare parts within 10 working days of a request, and for up to 7 years after the device goes off the EU market. This is a requirement that benefits the consumer but is bound to stretch manufacturers thin. That's like expecting Samsung to still have parts ready to ship for the Galaxy S9 series. Smaller manufacturers might have a tough time with that.
• Professional repairers should be given non-discriminatory access to repair-necessary firmware or software. This is a big move. Samsung came under fire about a year ago for requiring repairers to jump through certain sleazy hoops for access to its repair software.

The EU Will Also Make Energy Labels a Necessary Requirement for Smartphones

Just like other major electronics and appliances, the EU will make it a requirement that the packaging for smartphones contain information regarding the energy efficiency of smartphones, among other info.