Essential’s attempt to reinvent the wheel has predictably failed

When Android creator Andy Rubin started a new company, big things were expected, however it now appears the ideas were far too glorious to have any basis in reality.

Essential has announced it has taken its ideas as far as it can, and it will now cease operations.

In years gone, Rubin was known as a revolutionary. The founder and creator of Android was held in high esteem, with a reputation which grew each year the operating system become more dominant in the mobile world. This was the enthusiasm which was placed in Essential, but it has been a disastrous journey.

The company was founded in 2015, with funding from Playground Global, and in 2017 Rubin revealed the company was working on a new smartphone which was dubbed the Essential Phone. The delivery of this device was full of chaos thanks to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, supply shortage, a customer data leak and accusations of trade secrets theft. But this was only the beginning of the disaster.

Despite the rocky start, it was reported that Amazon, Tencent and Foxconn had invested in the company in August, valuing it at more than $1 billion. The belief was there, but it wasn’t until October 2018 that Rubin teased the world with the launch of another device, known as Project GEM. Unfortunately the world had to wait a year for any more information, and it was not good.

The device attempted to reinvent the shape of the smartphone, creating a device which was much slimmer. The smartphone was also designed to be more of a voice-interface device, a novel idea but perhaps miles ahead of what is technically capable or what the consumer wants.

This is the issue which Essential seems to have been facing. Rubin tried to invent a device which he believed was revolutionary rather than listening to what the consumer wants. Sometimes you have to ignore popular opinion to redefine an industry, Henry Ford famously said “if I was to listen to my customers, I would be breeding faster horses”, but this is not one of those cases.

Video consumption and mobile gaming are two of the biggest trends of the mobile world today, especially for the younger generations, those more likely to spend the big bucks on devices. However, Rubin’s devices ignore these trends, not offering enough screen real estate for such content to be relevant.

Essential’s vision got in the way of understanding what the consumer actually wants, and now the company will soon be non-existent. This should perhaps be a lesson to the innovators in Silicon Valley; revolutionary ideas have to be built on the realities of today.