Apple products stand out in a study of 2019 mobile device repair

Kaputt.de is a German site that facilitates and advises phone repairs, particularly those of the at-home variety. It has published the results of its study on this activity in 2019, including a comparison of the same from the preceding year. It reported that Apple and Samsung jointly accounted for just over 60% of all devices fixed by their owners themselves.

These users were most likely to swap a phone's battery by themselves, a procedure followed by display and charging port replacements respectively. In terms of actual models, the Galaxy S7 was most often the subject of these repairs, followed by the iPhone 6. These rankings were inverted compared to those in 2018.

Therefore, these stats may reflect an increasing regard towards sustainability (or reluctance to buy a new phone) among the consumers in question. Then again, Kaputt.de also concluded that they did not wish to remain reliant on OEMs in cases of damage or the need for service. 

They may also reflect brand popularity in Germany from year to year: for example, Sony gained the third spot in all at-home repairs in 2018, but lost it to Huawei in 2019. Owner-repaired phones from that OEM rose from 11.2% to 21.6% year-on-year; however, that may not carry on into the future.

These results, however, did not mean professional phone-fixers were out of work in 2019. They were most likely to be called upon to replace broken displays, up to 32.8% of which belonged to Samsung devices. Apple was second in terms of paid repairs with 23.7%. In addition, the iPhones 7 and X, along with the Galaxy S8, made it into the top 5 of phones repaired professionally, which was not the case in 2018.

One of the most common non-display professional repairs concerned the iPad Air (from 2013) and its battery. This device was the oldest (at just under 1% of non-DIY repairs) covered in this study, indicating that consumers are indeed committed to keeping their phones and tablets going for as long as possible these days.