It's a very sad story.

> Samsung, a company without much of a public environmental message, was tossing around big ideas born at a grassroots level. This was something new. We were jazzed(...)

> Friends inside the company told us that leadership wasn’t excited about a project that didn’t have a clear product tie-in or revenue plan.

My guess: some team had a bright idea and managed to secure early associates and evangelizers before someone higher up started asking how the project actually synergizes with other company priorities. Since it obviously didn't, because it was something pro-consumer for a change, it got gutted, and the name reused to push some "value-add" IoT crapfest.

> a weather station

Galaxy S4 has a barometer, thermometer, and hygrometer. Such promise! And sad that more recent phones have ditched the latter two sensors, at least the barometer is standard now. Hopefully UV arrives soon as a sensor and air quality as well, and then soon you've got a nearly complete real weather station node.

If my memory serves well, those sensors were hilariously inaccurate. The same way generally most generic smartphone/SoC sensors are (except maybe gyro). Even as essential as a compass on recent smartphones requires constant hand waving to improve accuracy. Or try to get location in a city in airplane mode.

With dedicated sensors and an rpi, much better purpose-built stations could be built for dollars, and that may be true for mostly any other phone recycling purpose I heard lately - apart from utilising them as networked cameras, due to the good onboard processing/lens that would be harder to achieve with off the shelve parts.

> Friends inside the company told us that leadership wasn’t excited about a project that didn’t have a clear product tie-in or revenue plan.

The fix for this is probably to charge manufacturers for ewaste, so they have a financial incentive to keep devices useful.

Most plans to charge manufacturers for e-waste seem to be at the point of original sale (where money is already changing hands). In such a scenario, Samsung probably doesn't get any credit for "making the same amount of e-waste in the long run, just slightly later after the sale for a subset of the devices sold".

The way to produce less e-waste is to sell fewer units. That comes with an obvious problem for Samsung.

Switch the plan to a core charge model: Require Samsung to collect old phones for a given cost. The more of them they can keep in use, the less it costs them. We know the core charge model works: Like 98% of lead batteries get recycled.

Upvoted for an elegant solution (at least for consumers upgrading phones). I do wonder if the lead acid core charge works better than the bottle deposit because the value is more, because it's not that much extra hassle, or some other factor.

I also am not sure (and never thought about it until just now) as to where the forfeited core charge money "goes" for consumers who buy a new phone (paying the core deposit) and then don't return a core phone within the required amount of time or if they buy a brand A phone and return an old brand B phone.

But I suspect that the overall model could work pretty well with some of the details carefully thought out. (AFAIK, in the lead-acid battery case, I can't just go to a parts store and force them to buy my core for $20, but if I am buying a new battery, they are forced to take my old core instead of charging me the $20 core charge [or whatever it is nowadays].)

I feel like you could address that by whatever retailer collected the phone being both required to collect it, but then also required to send the bill to the manufacturer.

Aka, you buy an Apple phone at your carrier, you turn in your Samsung phone, and Samsung gets sent the bill for the phone's collection and recycling. This would work even if someone just wanted to drop an old phone off at the store: Samsung's still responsible for footing the bill, so stores have no reason not to collect.

There’s an initial condition problem though. It’s unreasonable IMO to retroactively create a new obligation of $25 times every phone Samsung ever made. It seems like you’d have to assess the core charge on new sales as of some date (especially if your stated intention is to encourage the design of longer-lasting phones).

If you agree to that premise, now the store has to have a way to figure out whether a given phone has a core charge refundable from the manufacturer, whether the phone is genuine, etc in order to not have the core credit they paid out rejected by the manufacturer.

That's true. Laws about ex post facto are pesky, especially when there's a dire need to address a massive oversight of harm. I almost wonder if there'd be value in government subsidizing the return of old phones to ensure they're disposed of properly, and maintain the simplicity of a return system, but I don't know if the cost of that program would be on the scale of "government budget rounding error" or "defense spending on the F-35".

Man I tried so hard to do that with my galaxy S3 which had an unlocked bootloader (I don't think it even needed an exploit.)

Despite it's popularity though the ROM quality was extremely poor later in its life. I actually built my own busybox based OS for it from the GPL kernel source on Samsung's website but couldn't get most of the peripherals to work without all the Android stuff.

I've totally given up on Android. Thanks to the mobile Linux "movement" (or whatever) there are multiple better options now.