>It's a mediocre flagship.

So was Android.

It's a bet on Rubin himself and the team he's recruited, not on the current product.

But they have a product. It's a smartphone, in a saturated, downhill headed market.

They have another product as well, it's not a smartphone.

https://www.essential.com/home

It's like Google Home, without the enormous company full of brilliant software engineers behind it?

But with the brilliant software engineer who played a large role in making that company enormous.

I agree. Plus, I don't think this is differentiated from other flagships. Some people will like it others won't and I'm not sure if there is a moonshot in there to justify $300m.

Yeah I dont think the "phone" is their main play. Feels like they are trying to become the "one" iot platform that other big vendors cannot be?

Perhaps Rubin's end-game is to do a fork of Android that would break away reliance on Google and then be acquired by Samsung for a few billions.

How? I can't see how fragmentation can be good for anyone. The web has made progress since the jar days but even if you go the web route, you are still a serf (to continue the analogy that we are all serfs sorry couldn't find the link).

I wouldn't support a different app store that competes with Google for control of Android.

Fragmentation isn't even a thing for most people in the market for a smartphone. Anecdotally, most of my friends who uses Android isn't even aware of Google, the search giant. Most of them are only aware of Google as the account provider that they use to sign in to their phone.

Sorry for not clarifying. I wasn't talking about consumers but rather service providers who have to maintain a presence in all major platforms. From what I understand, Android exists because Google was fed up trying to get Google maps and mail and search applications on all j2me, symbian, and what not devices.

> that would break away reliance on Google

There are substitutes for Search, Gmail, Apps Suite and Chrome, but the rest of the basic services are not that easy to replace. Maps with turn-by-turn directions, Google Translate, Google Photos with unlimited backup are all essentials for mobile consumers nowadays.

Maps is doable, openstreetmaps is not bad or license from Here (or both). I'm not sure how many people need translate on a regular basis; I bet you could license that from someone though. Photos backup just takes money for storage, it's not particularly hard (you could instead work on making it easy to store with the end user's choice of provider, possibly with a revshare)

The real thing pulling to centralization is Google push, which requires play services, which requires playing by Google's rules.

If you don't have Google push on Android, you have to allow all the apps that want to get notifications from the server to keep open their own connections (which they may not have code for), which is going to kill battery life. The alternative is doing your own push services, but then you need to convince apps to support that, which generally requires apparent probable market share. Amazon managed to get some apps to do it for the Fire phone, but that didn't really go too well.

I actually think maps is the easiest to replace. We have bing maps, HERE, waze and multiple open source projects.

Waze is also owned by Google, but other than that I think it's a good point that there are a couple of other viable maps options. But still, you need something that actually works well, or you'll get to re-live the fiasco that was Apple Maps, so I don't think there are more than a couple viable options.