Is it normal for a carrier or manufacturer to handle the warranty for you?
What has been _your_ warranty experience in the USA & abroad in the EU & UK?

Case in point:
1. In April, I rec'd a handful of Android & iPhone devices from the carrier.
<https://i.postimg.cc/YC1B906F/tmopromo01.jpg> free & 1/2 price phones

2. Recently, I replaced one of those free phones under warranty
(the cables in the charging port somehow had became loose).

3. First the carrier told me to contact the manufacturer or credit card
company (since I had to pay the sales tax up front on the free phones).

4. But I then said "hey, you gave me the phone, not them), & they relented.

5. They said I had to trade it in at a store which costs $20 but I said
(hey, this is a warranty replacement which should be free), so they
gave me 20 bucks credit ahead of time (but I hadn't realized that).

6. At the store they _insisted_ on charging the 20 bucks which I at first
fought as my carrier has _never_ yet actually charged me anything extra
(not shipping, not SIM cards, not for ordering using a person, etc.).

7. But then they looked up my records and they told me I was already
credited the 20 bucks (see #5 above which I didn't realize they did
it that way as I had thought they were just not gonna charge me for it).

8. In the end, I was able to hand my old phone over to them and as they
opened the new phone to bring the old SIM card over, they offered
to port the old phone to the new phone, but I already had the entire
phone backed up to the SIM card so I declined that offer.

9. In the meantime, I had already bought a dozen new ten foot long
USB-C charging cables so I hope it won't happen again to this phone.

My question is based on what the carrier _first_ told me, which was that the
warranty should have been handled by the manufacturer and yet they relented.

What has been _your_ warranty experience in the USA & abroad in the EU & UK?

snip...
> My question is based on what the carrier _first_ told me, which was that the
> warranty should have been handled by the manufacturer and yet they relented.
>
> What has been _your_ warranty experience in the USA & abroad in the EU & UK?

Amazingly (or maybe not) I've only ever had one phone problem that I didn't
fix myself -- that was my old Nexus 5 that had a defunct battery but I
bumbled my way with fat fingers through replacing that. The one warranty
fix was a Pixel 3 which suffered from a battery swelling problem. This was
a bit of a mini-epidemic and, despite the phone being months out of
warranty, Google replaced it. It took a couple of email exchanges over a
few days and I needed to send them a picture of the obscenely bulging phone
but after that they just sent me a new replacement. The last time I had a
carrier-provided phone was back in the flip-phone candy-bar phone age and
and neither of them ever malfunctioned.

--
Bodger's Dictum: Artifical intelligence
can never overcome natural stupidity.