You don't have to take your phone to an Apple Store. There are plenty of mom & pop or chain repair places that can replace the camera module. I've been happy with uBreakiFix.
Nowadays the barrier for entry is much higher. Most things are soldered on, there's adhesive and sealing gaskets EVERYWHERE (fancy heating machines help, but cost $$), and even if you get it back together you can no longer count on the device being waterproof -- which is surprisingly a big deal for a lot of people, even though waterproof phones are a recent thing.
Waterproof phones might be a real thing, but dropping phones in water isn't. It used to be that certain clumsy friends of mine would write off a phone by dropping it in the toilet every few months. Most phones will survive this now.
Prepare the substrate, use the right silicone for your materials, use gap-preventing technique, and you can make it happen with high reliability even if you don't have an ultrasound to check your work. Your grandpa didn't have an ultrasound and his automotive gaskets had to put up with a lot more abuse than your phone ever will. There was no magic then and there's no magic now. You can do it too.
And don't even get me started on iPads, the screens never go back on right. I flatly refuse to work on them anymore.
Though this new batch of tinker friendly devices like Fairphone or Pinephone is something I track with interest. Main issue with phones getting obsolete is not hardware though as it is software. That keeps me hopeful especially regarding Pinephone, but Fairphone keeps updates significantly longer than run of the mill Android phones.
They are all too big for my taste, but that's a different subject altogether. I would like to see something in Unihertz Jelly 2 format. But for now I will stick to beat down phones.
It's the same in that loads of people say it's impossible when it actually just requires a new bag of tricks.
[1]https://www.extremetech.com/computing/280501-apple-confirms-...
But the number and complexity of tools has increased a lot. Used to take 2 screwdrivers to fix a phone or a laptop. Now you need special screwdrivers, a heat gun, pry tools, glue, small tweezers at least.
And a whole BGA rework station if you want to replace components with a decent quality of work.
Sure, but can you reassemble it after the disassembly? There are certainly products for which that is essentially impossible: https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/AirPods+2+Teardown/121471
I had a hell of a time trying to get someone to fix my Blackberry (long story) a few years ago (longer story) even though every store said they could handle it. They could not.
> The problem, an Apple repair representative explained, is that an open-for-business repair partner might still have to send the device into Apple anyway, a process that could have left me without a phone for well over a week and possibly longer.
Much like the apple stores, Apple forces AASPs to declare everything a mainboard repair and ship the devices in, forbidding them from doing simple port swaps and such.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_Dkzj10jeA
The officially refurbed mainboards have exceedingly low quality to boot. That same youtuber has run into official refurbs with rubber pads to push intermittent connections into position, boards that were clearly left in the oven over lunch break, and so on. Someone wrote in from the refurb center, which is apparently run like a sweatshop with competitive quotas that make shoddy refurbishing and "run it on the test bench again, it might work" nonsense inevitable. It's bad.
Apple Authorized repair doesn't exist to repair your device, it exists to persuade you to buy a new device.