February 24, 2026
Recycled dreams vs retail schemes
Samsung Upcycle Promise
Samsung teased recycling old phones into gadgets, then ghosted—comments erupt
TLDR: Samsung hyped a plan to repurpose old Galaxy phones, then delivered a watered-down version that vanished. Commenters roast the move as profit-first, debate the right to unlock your device, and bicker over Android’s “Linux” label, while DIY fans tout Termux to upcycle on their own.
Samsung promised magic in 2017: turn dusty Galaxy phones into baby monitors, game consoles, even full Linux computers. They showed working demos—Bitcoin-mining phone clusters!—and put the project on GitHub with iFixit cheering. Then… four years of silence. In 2021, “Upcycling at Home” trickled out as basically two smart home sensors and quietly faded away.
The comments are pure chaos. The loudest vibe? Corporate greed accusations. One user snarled that Samsung killed it because “the only thing that matters is money,” asking, “How about good PR?” Another camp is fired up about ownership: unlocking the “bootloader” (the phone’s software gatekeeper) should be a basic right, they say—if you can’t choose your software, do you even own your phone? The FSF (Free Software Foundation) vs Linus Torvalds drama gets name-dropped, adding spice to the rights debate.
Not everyone is doom and gloom. A hopeful voice wonders if upcycling could actually help Samsung by creating new uses instead of cannibalizing sales. Meanwhile, the DIY crowd waltzes in: with Termux, they brag you can turn old phones into mini servers, AI nodes, or a compute grid—no Samsung rescue needed. And the nerdfight kicks off when someone declares, “Android isn’t Linux; it’s marketing,” igniting a flame-war over labels. Jokes fly: “Upcycle at Home? More like Up-sell at Store,” and “baby monitor turned crypto bro.”
Key Points
- •Samsung proposed Galaxy Upcycling in 2017 to unlock bootloaders and enable an open-source marketplace for repurposed Galaxy phones.
- •iFixit co-launched the initiative; prototypes showed Galaxy S5 phones mining Bitcoin and functioning as smart devices.
- •Samsung went silent for four years after the announcement, with no public updates and ceased communication with iFixit.
- •In 2021, Samsung released Galaxy Upcycling at Home, which offered limited functionality and did not match the original vision.
- •The article cites internal concerns—lack of revenue model, proprietary software issues, and conflict with selling new phones—as reasons the program stalled.