Your old phone could have been so much more.

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In 2017, Samsung announced Galaxy Upcycling in partnership with iFixit — an ambitious program to let users unlock bootloaders on old Galaxy phones and repurpose them as smart home sensors, baby monitors, Linux computers, or gaming consoles. Four years of silence followed. When Samsung finally shipped 'Galaxy Upcycling at Home' in 2021, it was stripped down to just two features: sound detection and brightness measurement. No bootloader unlocking, no open-source marketplace, no custom OS support. iFixit called it 'nearly unrecognizable.' Despite this, Samsung won a Reuters Responsible Business sustainability award for the program. Samsung's recycling numbers are equally damning — only 38,000 phones collected out of 2 billion sold by 2019. The original GitHub page still exists, untouched. Samsung never officially canceled the program or acknowledged the gap between promise and delivery. Users who want to repurpose old phones can still do so independently via apps like Alfred, LineageOS, or the FSFE's Upcycling Android initiative — though Samsung's locked bootloaders make it harder than it should be.

Samsung's Galaxy Upcycle promised to make old phones useful, then won an award for giving up

Samsung won an award for its cosmetic sustainability