heres why i disagree<p>hardware fragmentation isnt something new, its been around since gadgets have, in fact things are much better than they were as at least we have some standardisation now if only a little. The situation is no different than for repairing most any gadget out there, in many cases easier as phones and tablets are often more common than other consumer electrical items like cameras or portable stereos.<p>secondly while parts for apple devices may seem abundant fakes are incredibly rife, unless you are extremely careful you will likely be getting non genuine parts unless youre buying stuff thats been stripped from a working device. Then theres the fingerprint reader issue, which is pretty much non replaceable on modern models.<p>all in all android device repair is little different from just about any other portable device in my opinion, glued components and proprietary connections are still everywhere in all our gadgets and as has been the case for a long time. often the best source of parts is finding another faulty device that has the part you need, or finding one on ebay that has been stripped from a dead device.<p>a recent example from my own experience but in a completely different field. im a big coffee lover and recently on ebay i spotted an untested commercial coffee machine for very little money. knowing nothing at all about coffee machine repair i put in a bid and got it.<p>it was an old machine from a small manufacturer, the manufacturers site didnt even list the model nor did they reply to emails and google/ebay searches turned up very little. however within 2 days i had managed to identify the problem, find that another manufacturer had used the same parts and source them from 3 different potential suppliers, within a week id learned not only how to strip and reassemble the whole thing and got it working but i also knew exactly where i could get any parts i could need even for such an obscure piece of equipment.<p>my point is fixing things is pretty much the same no matter what it is, you could level this same argument at most anything, car repair for example, sure cars all run on pretty much the same principle but they vary in a ton of ways, yet you dont hear mechanics moaning. i recently crashed my motorcycle but despite being a very popular make and model sourcing a replacement for the bent forks was very difficult, so at times finding parts for even the most popular things can be a challenge.<p>As a general rule most things arent really made to be repaired anymore, we live in a disposable world where generally something breaking means its upgrade time rather than calling out the repair man, when was the last time you called out a TV repair guy? sadly its a dying trade but i really dont think its that much different from anything other gadget or most anything really