Foxconn is the largest manufacturer of electronics in the world, employing well over 1 million people in its factories. The drive to produce more devices quickly and cheaply has led to abundant bad press due to working conditions and low wages, but the company has been working on a solution — robots. Earlier this year Foxconn announced its plans to deploy several thousand robots to take over for human workers, but a new report casts doubt on the feasibility of such a plan. The Foxconn robots (Foxbots) aren’t precise enough for Apple, so they won’t be getting their cold metal graspers on any iPhones. That throws a rather large monkey wrench in Foxconn’s plans.

Apple’s exacting standards require components to be installed with a tolerance of 0.02mm. That’s thinner than a human hair. The Foxbots, however, are only capable of 0.05mm accuracy. It’s still impressive as far as robotic assembly goes, but Foxconn’s dream of moving to a workforce that doesn’t need to be fed or housed is probably on hold. Luckily, Foxconn hasn’t gotten too far in its plans to install one million (apparently useless) Foxbots in its factories.

Other OEMs might not have the same exacting standards as Apple, but I doubt the likes of Samsung or Motorola will be too keen on accepting manufacturing tech rejected by Apple. It’s possible smaller Chinese companies that specialize in low-cost unbranded devices and iPhone knockoffs might be interested, though.

Most phones and tablets are assembled mostly by humans simply because of the precision required. Most robots don’t have the manual dexterity required to drop tiny components into devices on an industrial scale. The technology required to make this work exists, but you’d have to design entirely new industrial robots to make it happen. That throws the economics off balance. It seems counterintuitive, but the phone in your pocket might be more expensive if it wasn’t handmade. Foxconn is looking to save money fast, so it used automotive robots as the basis of the Foxbot design.

The robots, which cost between $20,000 and $25,000 each, are being used in Foxconn’s facilities despite lacking iPhone levels of precision. All the hard work is still being done by humans with their nimble fingers. The Foxbots are only allowed to tighten screws, polish metal, and handle packaging — easy stuff that a few extra fractions of a millimeter won’t affect.

Foxconn is reportedly redesigning the robotic arms in hopes a more precise version will get Apple’s seal of approval. That could take several years of research, but the resulting robots could have much greater finesse. There’s even talk of abandoning the automotive robot frame and instead designing something more like a human arm with multiple fingers. This would make the contraption considerably more versatile, but also more expensive. There’s usually a cost to automation–it can take several years for a company to recoup the research and deployment costs, and it looks like Foxconn isn’t going to get around that by repurposing automotive assembly line bots.

Now read: Robot hand uses static electricity to pick up almost anything – with no moving parts