In 2017, Samsung stood on stage at its Developer Conference and announced one of the most exciting sustainability ideas the smartphone industry had seen. Galaxy Upcycling would let you take your old Galaxy phone, unlock its bootloader, and turn it into whatever you wanted: a smart home sensor, a baby monitor, a Linux computer, a retro gaming console. iFixit co-launched the program. The open-source community was thrilled, especially given that Samsung had a GitHub page for it and everything.
Then nothing happened. For four years. When Samsung finally shipped something called "Galaxy Upcycling at Home" in 2021, it bore almost no resemblance to what was promised. And then that quietly faded into irrelevance too.
Galaxy Upcycle's initial pitch was great
Turn your old phone into a game console
To understand why this story is so frustrating, you need to understand what Samsung actually promised.
In May 2017, iFixit's Chief Tool Officer Eric Essen stumbled upon Samsung's upcycling project at Maker Faire in the Bay Area. iFixit's CEO Kyle Wiens was later invited to Samsung's headquarters in Suwon, South Korea, where he saw working prototypes. Old Galaxy S5 phones were being used to mine Bitcoin in a cluster. Others had been turned into smart doorbells and baby monitors.
The plan had two parts. First, Samsung would unlock the bootloaders on old Galaxy phones, which would also help projects like LineageOS that let you install custom operating systems on Android hardware. Second, Samsung would build an open-source marketplace where developers and makers could share applications purpose-built for repurposed phones. You could run whatever operating system you wanted on your old Galaxy. The project had a GitHub page, and iFixit's name and logo were all over the marketing materials.
The suggested use cases covered a lot of ground: smart fish tank monitors, weather stations, nanny cams, pet feeders, retro game consoles, full Linux computers. Old smartphones have fast processors, cameras, multiple sensors, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS, all of which still work fine long after people stop using them as daily phones. The idea was compelling because it was practical, and they weren't vaporware concepts, either; Samsung had built working demos. Imagine what it could do with a modern Home Assistant stack?
Wiens referred to it as "one of the best ideas that not only Samsung has ever had, but anyone in the entire device ecosystem has ever had." He wasn't wrong, and the concept was genuinely exciting.
Years of silence, then nothing
All we got were two sensors
After the 2017 announcement, Samsung went quiet. There were no public statements or references to the program; not even iFixit could get a response, as Samsung stopped replying to their emails entirely. People inside Samsung allegedly told iFixit that leadership wasn't enthusiastic about a project that lacked a clear product tie-in or revenue plan. Wiens believes the engineering team had the whole thing ready to launch and ran it up the corporate flagpole, only for it to be killed off by executives.
This makes sense when you think about what the original program actually required Samsung to do. Bootloader unlocking would strip Samsung's proprietary software from phones, cause PR headaches, and give the custom ROM community far easier access to modifying Samsung devices. Making old phones useful for longer also directly conflicts with Samsung's core business of selling new phones. Samsung's trade-in programs, which offer credit toward new devices, tell you what Samsung actually wants to do with your old phone: get it back and sell you a new one.
In other words, there was no clear way for Samsung to make money from Galaxy Upcycling. And for a company that ships hundreds of millions of phones per year, that's likely a death sentence for an internal project. When Samsung announced Galaxy Upcycling at Home at CES 2021, you'd have been forgiven for assuming based on the press release that the project had finally arrived. Unfortunately, it hadn't.
The shipped version could do exactly two things through the app: detect sounds (baby crying, dog barking, cat meowing, knocking) and measure room brightness to trigger smart home automations. That was it. There was no bootloader unlocking, no open-source marketplace, no custom operating systems, no community-built applications.
The device compatibility list was also strange. It required a Galaxy S9, Note 9, or newer running Android 9 Pie or later, meaning phones from 2018 onward. At the time of the beta launch, a Galaxy S9 was still worth around well over $100 on the secondhand market. In other words, Samsung's upcycling vision amounted to turning a phone that could go for $100 or more into a $30 light and sound sensor, and its availability was massively limited.
To be specific, the Galaxy Upcycling application was only launched officially in the US, UK, and South Korea, and it never really left beta. iFixit at the time referred to it as "nearly unrecognizable" compared to what was promised and what the iFixit had essentially co-launched alongside Samsung.
Samsung won an award for its cosmetic sustainability
Even after it stripped the program down
The most frustrating part of this saga, I find, is that Samsung actually won an award for its Galaxy Upcycle program. When it launched in 2021, the company won the Reuters Responsible Business "Circular Transition Award" for Galaxy Upcycling at Home. The judges praised it as "a simple initiative with a basic idea, which helps shift the mindset on the value of old phones. A genuine closed loop versus recycling of e-waste with an innovative twist."
Funnily enough, Samsung then folded the program into its "Galaxy for the Planet" sustainability initiative and tied it to UN Sustainable Development Goal 12, which covers responsible consumption and production. So, just to recap:
- Samsung announced an open-source upcycling program in 2017
- Supposedly ghosted its partners
- Seemingly killed the project internally
- Shipped a version so stripped down it barely functioned
- Won a sustainability award for it
Meanwhile, Samsung's own recycling numbers tell a different story. Its old phone collection campaign, running since 2015, had collected just 38,000 phones as of May 2019. Samsung had sold 2 billion Galaxy devices by February 2019. That's a recovery rate of 0.0019%, and Samsung wasn't actually doing a whole lot for sustainability, either.
You see, in 2022, despite the Upcycling experience, iFixit agreed to partner with Samsung on a self-repair program, and it seemed that iFixit was willing to give Samsung the benefit of the doubt. However, just two years later, in May 2024, iFixit ended the partnership entirely. The reasons given by iFixit were particularly damning. Apparently, Samsung priced parts so high that consumers often just replaced devices instead of repairing them. On top of that, Samsung limited repair shops to seven parts per quarter, which iFixit called "non-viable" since most shops handle seven Samsung repairs per day. Finally, Galaxy devices remained "frustratingly glued together," forcing bundled battery-and-screen replacements that drove up costs even more.
Both of these partnerships with iFixit ended the same way. Samsung's sustainability announcements look great in press releases and award submissions, but when they conflict with selling new hardware or keeping control over the software ecosystem, the sustainability project loses out.
You don't need Samsung's help, at least
You can do things yourself
You don't need Samsung's permission to pursue the original Galaxy Upcycling vision, at least not all of it. Old phones can be repurposed right now, though Samsung's locked bootloaders make it harder than it should be. For example, you can turn an old phone into a security camera using apps like Alfred or IP Webcam, use one as a dedicated smart home controller mounted to a wall, or set it up as a baby monitor, media player, e-reader, or digital photo frame.
If you want to go further, the Free Software Foundation Europe runs "Upcycling Android," which promotes installing free software on old Android devices to keep them going longer. LineageOS and other custom ROM projects let you install updated, lightweight operating systems on older hardware, though Samsung's phones with locked bootloaders make this way harder than it needs to be. You could still do something with it though, like turning it into a Home Assistant dashboard.
Even still, none of this matches what Samsung originally promised. A manufacturer-backed upcycling ecosystem with bootloader unlocking and an open-source app marketplace would have been something else entirely. But the workarounds exist, and they're better than letting your old phone collect dust.
Shockingly, Galaxy Upcycling at Home is technically still available to install as of 2026, but it hasn't been updated or expanded since its beta launch. Samsung hasn't said anything about reviving the original vision. Even the original Galaxy Upcycling GitHub page is still online, gathering dust.
Funnily enough, Samsung never officially canceled the original program. There hasn't been an announcement, explanation, or even an acknowledgment of the gap between what was promised and what was delivered, and it feels as if the company moved on hoping that people would just... forget.
To be cynical, smartphone manufacturers have every reason to make you buy a new phone and almost no reason to help you keep using your old one, yet Galaxy Upcycling directly threatened that model. It could make your old phone useful, possibly even useful enough to skip an upgrade cycle. And for a company that makes its money selling new ones, that was a problem no sustainability award could solve.