According to several studies, roughly 44% of the global population owns a phone and consumers in mature markets upgrade their smartphones every 18 to 20 months on average. This has several consequences:

  1. Consumers face every few months the hassle of migrating their data to a new device: across OS, or even within the same OS, there is not a quick and efficient system that ensures all data are instantly moved to the new device and securely deleted from the old one;
  2. Consumers often pay for diagnostic of devices where no fault is found. The downtime is disruptive, expensive and involve shipments to and from repair hubs that all add up to the environment impact of the device. Moreover, due to the hassle of getting the phone repaired, some people prefer upgrading to a new phone, further contributing to the creation of more ewaste;
  3. When upgrading to a new phone, consumers leave in their drawers millions of unused phones, often because there is not a safe way to erase data/unlock and thus resell these still fully functional devices. A consequence of this is that tons of rare and precious metals that could be recycled for further use in electronics are never fed back to the manufacturing cycle.

Moreover, the resell of 18 or 24 old devices represents a market opportunity for both private owners and professional resellers. Our company has developed certified and OS-agnostic tools that tackle data migration, diagnostics and data erasure. These tools are offered as SaaS (Software as a Service) to B2C customers who then offer such services to end users. The overarching goal of the project is to boost the company to become the standard tool for the lifecycle management of personal devices.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 811668.

​The results of the Horizon 2020 project include, but are not limited to, the following materials:

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