Repairability · Policy · Longevity

The Repair Score Is Coming for the Smart Home

SMARTS · 22 August 2026 · 12 min read

Repairability is about to stop being a virtue and start being a specification. For most of the smart home’s short history, the moment a device failed was the moment the industry’s interest in it ended: no parts, no manual, no telephone number that leads anywhere useful, only a suggestion to buy the next model. That arrangement was never written down. It was simply the default, and defaults are hard to see from inside. Europe has now changed the default for half a billion consumers, on a fixed date: 31 July 2026, when new EU right-to-repair consumer rules began applying — rules the European Commission describes as encouraging product repair and reuse, incentivising both producers and consumers, and reducing waste. Across the Atlantic the same idea is being tested in a different form: US PIRG’s Failing the Fix 2026, published in April, grades phone and laptop makers on repairability and argues for an American repair score modeled on the EU system used in the report, so that buyers can compare repairability the way they already compare screens and battery life. The score is coming. The smart home is not ready for it — not because its devices are unrepairable, but because the score that is coming measures the wrong thing for devices that are, in the end, software.

The Feeling First

The Shelf Where Devices Go to Die

The emotional texture of owning a connected device changes the moment you understand what a repair score is for. It is not a consumer report. It is a promise about the future — a statement, made before purchase, about what will happen when the thing breaks. Most owners have never had such a promise. The typical experience is the one nobody photographs: the dead hub in the drawer, the lock that clicks but no longer turns, the camera the app no longer recognises. The manufacturer has moved on, the manual has been taken down, the parts are not sold, and the repair shop says it cannot get components. The device was never hostile. It was simply not built to be taken apart by the person who paid for it.

A repair score converts that private moment of abandonment into a public, comparable fact. It changes the emotion of purchase — instead of trusting a brand’s reputation, you check a number the way you check a warranty — and it changes the emotion of ownership. A device with a published score, a parts list and a manual is a device you can argue with. The distance between dread at the moment of failure and competence at the moment of failure is the entire distance between being a customer and being an owner, and the repair-score movement, in both its European and American forms, is an attempt to close it with paperwork.

The Market

Europe Wrote It Down. America Is Grading It.

The European rules are not abstract. The EU’s Repair Directive was adopted on 13 June 2024, member states were required to transpose it into national law, and the new consumer rules began applying on 31 July 2026, per the Council of the EU. What the framework does in practice — the difference between what a consumer can demand during the warranty period and what applies after it — is set out in the European Consumer Centre’s guide to the rules. The post-warranty obligations are the genuinely new ground: repair is no longer only a favour the market extends when it suits it.

The American counterpart is not a law; it is an argument with grades. US PIRG’s Failing the Fix 2026, published 7 April 2026, grades cellphone and laptop companies and proposes a US Right to Repair score modeled on the EU system the report itself uses, so consumers can compare repairability. The scorecards have already done what scores do: Android Authority’s coverage of the report’s grades — Samsung receiving a D, Apple a D minus — shows how quickly a number attaches to a reputation. One qualification matters: the report grades phones and laptops, not smart home devices. The smart home is the obvious next frontier, and the report’s premise — that a score lets consumers compare repairability before buying — is the premise this magazine has watched the category avoid for a year.

The commercial context is the smart home itself, projected to grow from roughly $162.8 billion in 2025 to about $207 billion in 2026, per Grand View Research. A category that size, filled with devices that combine batteries, hinges, seals, radios and cloud accounts, is where a repairability score either proves its usefulness or reveals its limits. Right to Repair Europe’s assessment of the EU framework documents the movement toward minimum repairability scores in the EU — the mechanism by which “repairable” stops being a marketing word and becomes a graded quantity with a methodology behind it.

The Pain

Two Clocks, and Only One Is Being Scored

The pain the policy treats is real, and specific. It is the owner who cannot get a part, a manual, or a repair; the repair counter that says no; the labour cost that exceeds the purchase price. The right-to-repair movement exists because that experience is common enough to be political, and the EU’s rules and PIRG’s report are both responses to it. But the pain specific to the smart home is a different one, and it is the one the score will not measure.

A repair score is built from parts, tools and disassembly. Whether the battery can be replaced, whether the screen can be bought, whether a hinge can be swapped. Those are real questions, and the answers matter. But a connected device runs two clocks at once. One is physical — the battery, the hinge, the lens, the seal — and it is the clock being scored. The other is software — the server the device talks to, the account it is welded to, the update cadence that keeps it alive. The peer-reviewed literature has begun to make precisely this point: a Taylor & Francis analysis of smart devices and the right to repair examines how the repair paradigm applies to goods whose useful life is bound up with their software layer — the case where repairing the hardware is not the same as prolonging the product. Physical repairability and software longevity are two different clocks, and only one of them is being scored.

The second clock is also the one nobody discloses. The FTC’s audit of connected-product pages found that of 184 pages reviewed, only 21 — 11.4 percent — disclosed how long software support would last; 88.6 percent did not, per the FTC’s report. And 72 percent of Americans who own smart devices say support-duration disclosure should be mandatory, per the joint proposal by Consumer Reports, US PIRG and the Secure Resilient Future Foundation. So the buyer of a connected device faces an asymmetry the score will inherit: a physical repair that is about to be graded, and a software lifespan that is not disclosed at all. The score tells you whether you can replace the battery. Nothing being built tells you whether the device will still be alive when the battery needs replacing.

The Numbers

Eleven Point Four Percent

The numbers in this story are small, precise, and damning. Of 184 connected-product pages audited by the FTC, 21 disclosed software-support duration — 11.4 percent, per the FTC report. Seventy-two percent of American smart-device owners want that disclosure to be mandatory, per Consumer Reports and allies. The EU’s Repair Directive was adopted 13 June 2024 and its rules apply from 31 July 2026, per the Council of the EU. PIRG’s report, and its proposed US score, arrived on 7 April 2026, per US PIRG — with the coverage of its grades, Samsung D and Apple D minus, per Android Authority, showing the reputational currency a score can carry.

One further distinction, because the coverage will blur it: three separate systems are in play, and they are not interchangeable.

The Buy

How to Read a Score That Does Not Exist Yet

Until the score arrives, act as though it had. Four habits at the point of purchase.

1. Weight the questions by where the device fails. Battery and hinge access matter more in wearables than in hubs. A hub sits on a shelf and fails by obsolescence; a wearable — a ring, a watch, glasses — fails where it meets the body: the battery that degrades, the hinge that loosens, the seal that wears. Ask about the parts that touch you before you ask about the parts that sit inside.

2. Learn to read a repairability index before you need one. The shape of these indices is known from the EU’s movement toward minimum repairability scores, per Right to Repair Europe: parts availability, manual availability, disassembly difficulty, and — in the better systems — a software-support component. At minimum, demand three documents before buying: a published parts price list, a service manual, and a disassembly guide. A maker that cannot produce any of the three has answered the repairability question regardless of what its advertising says.

3. Demand the software answer in writing. Because 88.6 percent of connected-product pages do not disclose how long software support lasts, per the FTC audit, the question is yours to ask: how long will this model receive security updates, and what happens when that period ends? Get the answer in writing before purchase, not after.

4. Ask what happens at the end of support. A repairable device that cannot be updated is a liability, not a keepsake. The score will not answer this; the question belongs to you. The buyer who treats the support window as part of the price — the way the EU’s post-warranty repair obligations, per the European Consumer Centre, treat repair as part of the product’s expected life — will not be surprised when the server goes dark.

The Last Word

The repair score is coming for the smart home, and it will arrive carrying two clocks. One of them — the battery, the hinge, the screw — it will measure well, and the measurement will be an improvement over the silence that preceded it. The other — the server, the account, the update — it will not measure at all, because nobody has built the instrument. The EU’s rules, per the European Commission, and PIRG’s proposal, per US PIRG, are both honest attempts to build it, and the peer-reviewed analysis of smart devices and repair, per Taylor & Francis, is where the field already knows the difficulty lives. Until the instrument exists, the buyer has one advantage over every regulator: the audit can be done at the kitchen table, with the maker’s own documents, before the money changes hands. A score will one day tell you whether the device can be opened. Ask the questions yourself, and you will also know whether it deserves to be.

— THE SMARTS DESK

Sources

Research Appendix

Every statistic in this article links to its primary source. Full list, as of 22 August 2026: