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What’s on Your Home Screen, Kyle Wiens?
The iFixit co-founder discusses his screen-off approach to smartphones
This is “What’s on Your Home Screen?,” a Q&A column from OneZero. We want to understand more about how people use their smartphones — those life-consuming devices we dump hours into every day — to pave a way toward a better future. Or at least a more reflective one. We’ll add new entries regularly, and each will feature a new interview with a notable person about the apps they use, how they’re organized, and whether those red bubbles drive them nuts.
Technology should last. Replacing your smartphone every couple years is expensive and unsustainable — which helps explain why people are less inclined than ever to buy new devices.
Still, you’ll have to get a new one eventually. The battery will degrade, or some new version of the operating system will come out that your phone isn’t powerful enough to run.
Kyle Wiens, CEO and co-founder of iFixit, faces these problems every day. His company sells tools and provides repair guides to help consumers fix their gadgets and squeeze more life out of them — efforts that many major tech companies oppose even as “right to repair” bills gain traction on the national stage.
All of this set the stage for a meaty conversation about how Wiens uses his own devices, which are, unsurprisingly, selected for repairability and longevity.
What follows is our chat, edited for length and clarity.
OneZero: You’re the first Android person we’ve had in this column. Why is this your phone of choice?
Kyle Wiens: I go back and forth. The reason I switched this time is because Motorola supports helping consumers fix their stuff, so I’ve got a Moto X4.
Tell me a little more about that.
All phones these days have batteries that are glued in, and no cellphone manufacturer is selling replacement batteries, except Motorola. They’re the only ones…
