Andy Rubin Nears His Comeback, Complete with an ‘Essential’ Phone | Hacker News Reader

Andy Rubin Nears His Comeback, Complete with an ‘Essential’ Phone

bloomberg.com

114 pointsapress71 comments

If you ask me, "essential" is something that removes the bloat of questionably useful "AI assistants" poking their noses into every conversation in order to better advertise to you — not to mention a lot of the other junk that clutters up modern smartphones inside and out.

I don't think we should all return to feature phones by any means, but people still struggle with basic usability and you can't count on, for example, a phone to last all day doing regular stuff, or to be relied upon to work anywhere in the world.

To me trying to outdo the bleeding-edge devices and services is not a valuable proposition, since small advances here and there mean 1st place in whatever area (payments, notifications, accessibility) is passed around like a football.

Why not focus on the "next billion users" or whatever people like to say? Why on the top few percent of existing users, who will only get a fractional improvement to their experience? It strikes me as shortsighted. But I suppose that's where the money is today.

Essential means different things to different people.

To you: This device is not fancy but it gives me just what I need -- no more.

To marketroids: This fancy, feature-encrusted gewgaw is the new base minimum for what you need.

This reads like a PR plant piece: Glowing profile of the founder, check. Bragging about the talent hired, check. Macho goals to upend the entire industry, check. Deep pockets, check.

But all that is standard. Now to the damning bits (damning for the article, that is):

Loving attention to irrelevant details, check. Obviously, the devices themselves should be beautiful ad have high-end cachet. But until the moment of release, these are irrelevant and have no differentiation value. If and when they are ready to ship, then and only then will we know if they are ahead, even, or behind the major players in materials and industrial design.

If they are a year or more away from putting phones in the hands of consumers, things like the strategy for charging, the screen materials, the ports, and the accessories are irrelevant.

Sure, they create a certain vapourware desirability: If that phone was available now, it would be attractive. But anybody can “design” such a thing. Who knows whether they can sort out how to get it manufactured reliably, at scale, and at an appropriate price point?

Phones are not supercars.

And on the matter of AI, everything is possible, but little of value is likely. They may turn out to make a major breakthrough that Google and Apple are unable to copy, but this article doesn't explain what it is.

Overall, I say nothing about the company itself and I wish them well. But the article is absolute garbage.

I don't know. "Andy Rubin starting new phone company" is enough of a headline to get me pretty pumped. Between the Sidekick and Android he's shown he is able to think pretty good about the mobile future.

Didn't read much of the article, but I am excited. So I think the excitement is warranted.

The article makes the assumption that this device uses a brand new OS but I suspect it's just android with some additions.

A team of 40 cannot create anything that competes with the android of today. Not even Andy can do that.

While you're probably right, it could be something very different. It could be running a custom GUI on NetBSD or something. How it competes is unknown.

Phone, sms, camera, email and web browsing are the essentials.

Everything else, FB, Instagram, Reddit etc that are usually done in apps on Android, they can be done with a decent browser.

And in many cases, you could potentially pass that stuff off to the cloud. Heck, voice recognition, AI and Hootsuite.

"Clara, show me that photo in monochrome."

"Here you go Nexxxeh, I've applied a filter called 'HDR Noir Pop'. Would you like to see other filters for monochrome? "

"Post this to Insta, caption 'Phone mirror selfie hashtag Essential hashtag swag'. Then link that on Twitter, caption 'hashtag essential'."

"Immediately or schedule for your usual time of 7pm?"

"Schedule."

"That's been scheduled for 7pm, alongside publishing the YouTube video entitled 'Essential Phone Unboxing' on your main YouTube channel and a link published to Facebook.

Your flight for 6pm is still on time, your Uber is booked for 5pm and the estimated journey time is 30 minutes. Your packing checklist is complete.

Would you like to watch today's Philip DeFranco show on YouTube?"

That's all stuff Alexa /could/ do if she was made a bit more proactive.

Arguably the hard problems have been solved elsewhere. You've just got to pay for them and integrate.

I don't think it's inconceivable.

> It could be running a custom GUI on NetBSD or something. How it competes is unknown.

I think the point the OP is making is that any custom OS will, at this point, fail. Windows Phone, WebOS and FirefoxOS all tried and couldn't compete with the sheer number of apps on other platforms. You say that a decent browser will be a fine substitute for apps, I'd argue that every OS that has tried to do this and failed is evidence that it is not an acceptable substitute at all.

Ugh don't remind me of WebOS. What a beautiful OS, wasted by an incompetent company.

Some days I still wonder what the world would look like if geeks had picked WebOS instead of Android to rally around.

Given that Matías Duarte had a big hand in both Android and WebOS, I would imagine it wouldn't look all that different.

Unfortunately there are still many features[1] that Android (and iOS) haven't stolen from webOS. The few features implemented have merely been copied poorly. I still multitask much more comfortably on a Pre 3.6" screen phone than on the 12.9" iPad Pro.

And while we're in the topic of AI assistants, I still think these voice-only interfaces on iOS/Android, don't match the simplicity of webOS' Just Type. You have to memorize the capabilities and/or syntax for Siri and Google Assistant whereas webOS would autocomplete/autosuggest as you 'Just Type'. That experience is still profound imo. (If any of Andy Rubin's Essential team is reading this, please add 'Just Type' as a core feature to your assistant)

[1] http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2012/02/21/steal_webos_feature...

I agree, but on the other hand, it might be 40 full time employees and 2,000 contractors, or some other unique arrangement.

Yes, and it's quite hard to do compete with the big companies on what they're trying to achieve with much more people.

More people can be as much of a liability as not. A core team of 40 people can certainly make the software and hardware design. It's as big as a core team should ever be for a product the scale of a smartphone, IMO.

Obviously it takes 1000s to scale, and optimize, and automate every last thing. But to build the first 1? Team of 40.

Android was originally built with a small team, and Andy Rubin resisted growing the team for a long time. But a lot of the worst parts of the design were laid down at that point, so I'm not sure it was necessarily such a good approach!

yes! imho, that's the noteworthy aspect of this story. those two features (Andy Rubin. small team.) of the original Android platform are going to try again? the track record is not great. if Google hadn't bought it and used its vast powers to promote the thing, would it even still exist?

i don't know. maybe they'll get it right this time...

Of course. I'm not sure why anyone would think otherwise. Trying to create a competitive and compelling mobile experience today requires an ecosystem of apps, tooling and most importantly developers. You get all that with Android for free. Unless he's come up with some revolutionary technology that eschews the need to rely on the Android ecosystem he doesn't really have much choice if he wants consumers to buy his phone.

you can always offer a well refined android compatibility layer :p

The more refined apps (which are the ones customers care about) use a variety of Android platform services, not just the barebones stuff -- homescreen widgets, rich notifications, bundled notifications, app-defined quick settings, fingerprint authentication, Vulkan API, Cast support, Material themes, Play services etc. etc. etc. Building a complete compatibility layer means pretty much reimplementing all Android userspace.

You don't need to reimplement all Android userspace. You only need to implement 90% of what the top 20 apps use.

90% of Android is a whole lotta code

Microsoft did something similar with the Astoria project, but they gave up on it, probably because of the Play Services dependency of most apps. And yes, you could enable it in Insider builds, and it mostly worked. Slap microG on it and you'll see it can be done.

> Trying to create a competitive and compelling mobile experience today requires an ecosystem of apps, tooling and most importantly developers.

I agree those things are all important considerations but you're lumping too many things together.

Some of those are antithetical. For example, buying into an existing app ecosystem means you don't get your own developer mindshare.

And tooling doesn't suffer from network effects the same way app stores and developers do. For example, they could use Android but write a new UI framework. They'd still make use of Android tooling, get partial entrée into the Android developer mindshare, but divest of the app base.

Personally I don't think a phone startup can succeed without creating a new UI framework around a new paradigm, whether it's VR, social, AI, semantic Web, or whatever. Facebook had the right idea although they failed.

If you are just competing for the same users with the same apps you will lose to Samsung. You need a new app base. Imagine a game console that only had multiplatform games. Who would buy it? A game platform with no third party games but a few compelling (to a niche) first party ones would have a better foundation.

Android has gotten bloated and has grown extra layers in part because it had to maintain compatibility, and in part because some development wasn't tightly integrated with the platform. It may be possible to develop a phone is that does all of what Android needs to do with a team of 40 and is much cleaner.

Especially if the alternative means making substantial modifications to Android.

Alternatively, one could build a dual stack Android, with one compatible UI stack and one built for the edge to edge UX.

I'm not sure why you got downvoted for this. I had a similar idea - what if the phone could run a faster, leaner version of Android by ditching backward compatibility? Or perhaps they have really focused their team on performance, or lowering power consumption, through software improvements.

Granted, the article seems to focus on AI mixins, but "it runs 90% of the top 1000 apps, and all of the most popular ones, with 30% better battery life" could be compelling too.

I know very little about Android, but I thought your comment has some merit.

I would call it difficult, but with a few years with them it's not entirely impossible. They are not going to reinvent the wheel, no one does, but may be provide a platform for great ideas. I am optimistic about this bet.

>> Essential's engineers are developing a proprietary connector that serves double duty for charging the battery and expanding the phone's functionality over time, one person familiar with the planning said.

This is unfortunate. I wonder where usb-c falls short in their design?

And then there's the EU market where it's mandatory for phones manufacturers to equip phones with USB charging.

They'll just provide some dinky adapter.

Which is essentially meaningless right? My EU iPhone still has a Lightning port, but sure the other end of the cable is USB.

Oh no, it's not. It's really a good thing that wherever you go now you know you can charge your phone with anybody's charger or computer. The iPhone is a minor special case.

Exactly -- people forget that every phone used to have its own special power cable until the EU forced them to standardise. It was such a pain, especially for developers working with multiple phones, but even just trying to figure out which power brick is whose in a normal household!

> are developing a proprietary connector that serves double duty for charging the battery and expanding the phone's functionality ... magnetic ... sphere-shaped camera add-on that shoots high resolution 360 degree photographs

Mildly hilarious if, based on this leak, Samsung not only rushes a copycat feature to market first but is also first to file patents for it. Bonus internet points if their rushing it to market means it explodes.

Strength.

It is a connector, but you cannot fasten something using it. This is why they would have come up with a new connector. Hopefully it expands on USB C, as in the interface is USB C and they've just created a new fastener mechanism around it.

Nope. There's just no way it can compete against Apple, Google _and_ Samsung, also known as the only three companies that make money on mobile. Andy or no Andy, you just can't enter this market anymore.

Well, he could partner with Nokia. I don't think Google/Samsung can compete with such a paternship (serious).

The game has moved from devices to services those devices provide. Having those services costs billions of dollars per year, to both keep up on the data side and to pay a small army of extremely in-demand engineers. And then, unless you're Apple or Samsung, the only significant profit stream is ads, since people have been conditioned by Google that services should be "free". I don't care how much of a genius Andy is, there's no way to really win this one.

What are the odds he'll be acquired by Google in the next 2yrs even if the product flops? AI and smartphones...

He's got FU money. He has fame and recognition. He has no reason to sell to Google at this point in his life.

I doubt all the engineers he has hired who have stock options have FU money. That would probably be a consideration.

This did cross my mind. In this case parent's post should be "if the product fails they'll try to sell to Google". If the company has traction he'll be swinging for the fences and maintaining control.

Yeah, basically either get what value you can in the worst case. The best case will still get your people value even if you maintain control.

Why would that be a consideration?

We'd all hope so, but in practice it only depends on the board of Rubin's company and their goals.

Because you really need to think of the reasons you were able to recruit those engineers with stock. Getting some value for that stock should be a consideration even for a flop. Success will probably take care of itself.

> Why would that be a consideration?

In a startup company, everyone should be on the same page. A founder with FU money is not on the same page as an engineer risking 2-3 years for a shot at FU money. I'm almost certain that investors would look at an FU money founder differently than a ramen founder.

As a startup engineer, I have done this. There are startups. There are corporations. Both have their place and their appeal. But I'll avoid corporate startups.

After what he managed to do after buying a dozen robotic companies, I'd say 0.

no - it will be Microsoft

Amazon and Apple are both possibilities.

Bezos has shown himself entirely unafraid of taking shots and failing. I won't be surprised to see him go after the smartphone market again in some manner if he believes he has something very interesting to leverage.

Apple is no longer the product company they used to be, and Cook can't do anything about that with his skill set. Eventually, sooner rather than later, they (institutional shareholders first, then management) are going to start to get very desperate and will turn to acquisitions increasingly to try to restart the growth & innovation engines. The immense iPhone profits have temporarily insulated Apple from having to deal with the reality of zero growth and low-interest products (who cares about the iPad, it couldn't be any less interesting or innovative at this point). Right now Apple is dead in the water, coasting in a stagnant fashion on the last product of Steve Jobs; that situation can't and won't last. Unless they replace Cook with a product CEO, their only shot is to buy lots of other companies and hope something comes out of it.

Zero IMO. I think the people at Google have had it with Andy. His parting wasn't a surprise. It was more of a mutual agreement.

>" I think the people at Google have had it with Andy."

But he was there for 9 years. Thats a very long time to "have had it" with someone.

Why all this Andy hate? Guys, entrepreuners create things from scratch, it's what they do. And they take on the megacorps and beat them. Sundar cannot compete against a fast moving company despite the billions of $$ that google has.

From scratch? Ha. He copied iOS.

It's awfully difficult to copy something that doesn't exist.

"Android, Inc. was founded in Palo Alto, California in October 2003 by Andy Rubin"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_(operating_system)

Um, so? First, iOS was in development for years. Early Android didn't look anything like the final product. It was changed to copy iOS in extraordinarily obvious ways after Eric Schmidt was able to steal Apple's IP while he was on the Apple board.

Early Android had no touchscreen and was more similar to the BlackBerry. If you read the Wikipedia article you just linked to, you'd learn that:

>Speculation about Google's intention to enter the mobile communications market continued to build through December 2006.[37] An earlier prototype codenamed "Sooner" had a closer resemblance to a BlackBerry phone, with no touchscreen, and a physical, QWERTY keyboard, but was later re-engineered to support a touchscreen, to compete with other announced devices such as the 2006 LG Prada and 2007 Apple iPhone.[38][39] In September 2007, InformationWeek covered an Evalueserve study reporting that Google had filed several patent applications in the area of mobile telephony.[40][41]

I don't understand it myself either. He's an entrepreneur that created something that had global impact. He's now moving on to something new. I wish him the best of luck and will be interested in seeing what he delivers.

There is no room for another "meaningful" phone IMHO. Even when it is developed by Andy Rubin himself. Phone business is hard, it's very hard. No room left for another one.

Think of it as him working on the next major iteration of Android in a legal construct that allows for it to be sold to Google.

The more competition the better.

While Android and Apple have the most dominant market share, they could be usurped with the right product (Hardware and Software combination). Best of luck to Andy and his team AND Microsoft with ARM Qualcom 835.

MWC will be a MUST watch event!

Hope it's the next coming of WebOS, which itself was a few years ahead of it's time being javascript based on a platform that didn't give it a chance to succeed.

To realize the future of what applied AI looks like, you must have control of your entire experience and pipeline top-to-bottom. People ask us why we're building our own hardware, this is the reason.

I can see the benefit of an AI having access to more of your data (owning the whole experience). But can you explain why the hardware is so important? Why couldn't it be implemented as an app?

Dedicated hardware would be much, much faster than an app, and would give much more guarantees about real time performance. There are a growing number of FPGAs and ASICs being used in AI research because they can be intimately tuned for the task at hand.

Maybe it will be a Jarvis(ish) platform, with a nice addition of a functional phone? A great "personal assistant" can make a real difference between this and any of the competitors.

> Essential's engineers are developing a proprietary connector that serves double duty for charging the battery and expanding the phone's functionality over time

a.k.a. Project Ara?

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