The auto industry has widespread part available for decades with no ill effects.

That depends on who you ask. Car dealerships probably think they have suffered great ill effects from the existence of independent repair shops.

> because reverse logistics (how you deal broken/returned goods) is already a huge cost center and the legislation as proposed would make it more so

How would right to repair affect that? And if it wasn't profit-motivated how do you explain the extreme efforts some manufacturers do to prevent people from repairing their own devices (like iPhone cameras being associated with the logic board and not being usable in any other phone of the same model)?

Ships hundreds at a time. A lof of the parts used for repair in China are coming from US/EU broken phones.

The other very common possibility is that it's what's called a "ghost shift" where the factory runs a whole production run on a possibly overnight work shift, creates a batch of product for sale to third parties, and then resumes their legit-for-transfer-to-apple production run the next morning. Happens with all sorts of electronics manufacturing in mainland china.

This does not necessarily mean that the ghost shift products go through absolutely the same level of QC that the main production run gets, but I wouldn't call them counterfeit.

Presumably a high volume and skilled third party repair shop and its purchasing people will be a crucial role in buying and distinguishing between the two types of hardware.

To some extent words mean what people who use them intend to mean, but in my opinion we shouldn't be calling parts from the same production line counterfeit, because the word implies forgery.[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootleg_recording

2. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/counterfeit

Edit: changed a word for clarity.

If they had a particular QC standard marking, but had not been manufactured in accordance with that level of QC, that would be forgery, right?

If they bear the trademark of a company that demands certain QC standards, but were produced without those checks, it seems like the same thing in a way.

You don't have to do that.

You're probably partly right some of the time, and my perspective probably has some value perhaps maybe.

I respect that a lot.

In the absence of a legal after market or licensed / genuine / third party parts ecosystem, this is, or should be, the expected natural response: off license / bootleg / counterfeit parts ecosystem.

In my opinion, then, the fault lies with Apple, and / or the absence of a regulated market for those parts and the necessary documentation.

People will find a way to source what they want. How you approach or deal with those problems is probably a political / ideological thing.

Saving the planet is far more important than protecting the profits for replacement parts. Of course they shouldn’t be allowed to sell complete phones but selling screens is good.

For an interesting contrast, look at the automotive industry, where (with the exception of perhaps some newer companies/models, like Tesla et.al.) there is a thriving aftermarket which is so complete that for certain models of cars, you can likely build an entire powertrain and even rolling chassis using zero original parts. Entire engine blocks, internals, transmissions, axles, suspension, brakes, even frame rails, can be bought from the aftermarket. Of course a lot of these parts are enhanced and marked with different manufacturer's names, but the OEMs themselves have in general not minded and sometimes even encouraged the aftermarket.

In much the same way that salvage yards are a source of car parts, yet companies like Tesla are trying to stop that.

I replaced my broken Galaxy S4 screen when in Shenzhen in 2015, and bought a replacement screen for Galaxy S3 for my wife (to have a spare I could use to perform the repair myself back home). My repair was dirt-cheap - I paid something like $10 to get a whole new screen assembly and a new back camera (I broke mine), the whole repair done in front of me in under 5 minutes. The extra screen for my wife was much more expensive - ~$50, IIRC. The difference is, with my phone, they kept the broken parts. They presumably replaced the broken glass in it at their own pace, and put it back on the market.

I also saw plenty of work being done on phone components, as well as people unloading and sorting through big bags of broken phones. There's lots of e-waste recycling going on there.

So how are legitimate high street shops in the west doing it? You can’t convince me every town in the UK has a criminal operation working in the open doing screen replacements?

the only way you'd get the plod even vaguely interested would be if these arrived in boxes that claimed they were genuine parts, and even then...

And they don't claim to be authorised in any way. I would have thought if they were they'd make a big deal of that.