EU Ecodesign Rules Set Battery, Software and Spare Part Minimums
Phased between June 2025 and February 2027: batteries at 80 percent capacity after 800 cycles, five years of software updates, and seven years of spare parts availability.
A set of EU rules rolling out in phases between June 2025 and February 2027 places durability and repairability at the centre of how phones and tablets must be built, drawing on the EU Batteries Regulation and the Ecodesign regulation covering smartphones, mobile phones, cordless phones and tablets.
Three of the requirements are specific enough to design against. A battery must retain at least 80 percent of its capacity after 800 charge cycles. Security and functional software updates must be provided for at least five years. Spare parts must remain available for at least seven years for smartphones, and up to ten years for large household appliances.
The 800-cycle threshold is the one with the deepest engineering reach, because cycle life is governed by charging behaviour as much as by cell chemistry. Charging to full and holding there ages a cell considerably faster than stopping short, which is why adaptive charging that delays the last stretch until it is needed has appeared across the industry. Meeting a cycle-life number is therefore partly a firmware problem, and a device whose charging logic ignores it will fail the requirement with a perfectly good cell inside.
Source: EcoPV