Android's Father Wants This New Phone to Take On Apple and Samsung. What's His Vision for the Phone's Future?

First Andy Rubin has to sell more of his product. Then more still.

“I don't like any Android phone,” said Andy Rubin. So he built his own, and said he would use it to break Apple and Samsung's duopoly.

Andy Rubin is the father of Android. He started the project in 2003, and it went on to change the phone industry and the world with it. In 2005 Rubin took Android to Google, and three years later, working with HTC, he launched the first Android phone, the Dream (G1).

Rubin left Google in 2014. By then Android was the world's largest phone operating system, with 2 billion users and close to 80% of the smartphone market.

“After ten years on Android, with a 78% market share, I was thinking about what to do for the next ten years. Was I going to spend another decade fighting over one percentage point of market share, up or down? I had to do something different,” Rubin said.

After leaving Google, Rubin first founded Playground, a robotics incubator, and then the phone brand Essential, recruiting former executives from Samsung, Google and Qualcomm.

Essential has already raised hundreds of millions of dollars, with Tencent and Foxconn among its backers. SoftBank's $100 billion tech fund had planned to put in $100 million, but dropped the idea after one of the fund's own investors — Apple — objected.

Now the different thing has arrived: a $699 high-end Android phone whose front is almost all display, the Essential PH-1. Rubin also announced a smart speaker, Essential Home, and the Ambient OS it runs on.

Today's phone market looks nothing like the one Android was born into. Most phones no longer look meaningfully different from one another. Samsung and Apple hold half the market and take its profits, while Chinese manufacturers have a firm grip on China and are pushing into Southeast Asia and India.

Since Xiaomi, no newly founded company has managed to get a foothold in the phone business.

Rubin has founded several successful companies. What new vision can he bring to a market this mature?

The Essential phone's design follows the latest trends, but isn't unique

Most Android phones today look either like a Samsung or like an Apple.

At first glance the PH-1 looks like neither. Its four sides are squared off, and its four corners are rounded rectangles, which keeps the lines of the body from looking too severe. It is fairly close to the Sony Z3 Compact.

Its front is almost all display. That high screen-to-body ratio follows the current industry trend, the same one behind the Xiaomi Mi MIX, the Samsung Galaxy S8 and the LG G6. And like the Mi MIX, the PH-1 has a ceramic back.

After handling the PH-1, The Verge's editor-in-chief Dieter Bohn said it is wider than the Samsung Galaxy S8 and the slender LG G6, almost brick-like — but thanks to the narrow bezels around the 5.71-inch screen, it doesn't feel too big in the hand.

The problem with a high screen-to-body ratio is that there is no spare room on the front for a fingerprint sensor, so the PH-1's sits on the back.

This is a common design, and an awkward one to use. Whether you hold the phone upright or sideways, your finger has to grope around the back for the circular sensor to unlock it, and it is easy to smudge the camera instead. And if the phone is lying face up on a table, you can't unlock it at all.

The Samsung Galaxy S8 hasn't solved this either — it also puts the fingerprint sensor on the back. But the Note 8, due in the second half of this year, and Apple will probably have a better answer: putting the fingerprint sensor inside the screen.

The PH-1's mid-frame is titanium alloy, harder than aluminum, which protects the sides of the phone better in a fall and makes it less likely to break. But a harder titanium frame isn't all that useful in practice, because what usually kills a phone today is a shattered screen. A frame that gets knocked about, loses some paint or picks up a dent doesn't stop anyone from using the phone.

On hardware, the PH-1's processor, storage, RAM, camera resolution and screen resolution are all close to this year's flagships already on sale, such as the Samsung Galaxy S8 and the Xiaomi Mi 6:

• A Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor; 4GB of RAM; 128GB of storage;
• A 3,040mAh battery; an 8-megapixel front camera and a 13-megapixel dual rear camera;
• A 5.71-inch 19:10 display at 2560 x 1312, using Corning's fifth-generation Gorilla Glass;
• A USB-C port, with NFC support.

The most unusual thing about the PH-1's design is the camera on its front. It sits at the top of the phone, as on most phones, but the bezel is so narrow — there is almost no “forehead” — that the camera ends up occupying part of the display.

The Samsung Galaxy S8's front is less aggressive: it keeps a “forehead,” and the camera and the various sensors are all tucked in there. The Xiaomi Mi MIX moved its front camera down to the bottom-right “chin,” so it doesn't touch the display at all.

Andy Rubin explained that the camera was custom-made and sits behind the screen in that spot. Because the icons in an Android notification bar fill in from both edges toward the middle — notifications pile up on the left, while Wi-Fi, battery and signal appear in order on the right — a camera in the center doesn't get in the way of everyday use, though he admitted the design “looks funny.”

Watching 16:9 video on the PH-1 isn't affected either, because the display is 19:10: turn the phone sideways and a 16:9 video has black bars at its edges.

Play something in the 2.35:1 ultra-wide ratio used by films today, though, and the camera will block the edge of the picture.

In practice, a camera sitting there and breaking up the screen's normal display area, blocking part of the view, is bound to get in the way of what the user sees — and more than Andy Rubin allows.

The PH-1 is open for pre-order now, either at $699 for the phone alone or $749 for the phone plus the 360-degree camera.

It comes in four colors — black, gray, white and green — and, unlike with other phones, buyers don't have to choose between storage versions: there is only one, 4GB plus 128GB. Rubin said the new phone would ship within 30 days.

Essential thinks phones need a better accessory standard to drive innovation

To the right of the PH-1's rear camera are two magnetic metal contacts. They are effectively a port: they hold an accessory in place magnetically, and a near-field communication chip built into that area transfers the data, at up to 10Gbps.

Andy Rubin says this amounts to a wireless USB 3.0 port, and that the goal is to make it the future standard for connecting peripherals.

They have now built a $50 360-degree panoramic camera accessory, a little bigger than an adult's thumb. It can be that small because it has no battery, Wi-Fi or Bluetooth chips.

To use it, you just line the camera up with the metal contacts on the phone and let it stick. The phone powers the camera through the contacts, shooting happens in the phone's own camera app, and the photos are stored straight on the phone.

Samsung has a similar accessory, the Gear 360, which costs five times as much as the PH-1's 360-degree camera. And because the Gear 360 has a battery, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips crammed inside, Samsung's panoramic camera is not only more expensive but also bigger.

Modular designs are not rare in this industry. Motorola's Moto Z uses one.

Its problem is that the modules are tied too tightly to the body, so modules made for this generation of the Moto Z can't be used on a product of a different size — unless the shape of the next phone barely changes.

The advantage of the PH-1's approach is that it keeps the functions while making them easier to use: snapping a magnetic camera module on and off is less trouble than plugging and unplugging a headphone or charging cable.

Andy Rubin says he wants it to become a new standard, a new accessory-port standard for the phone industry. A standard this easy to use, he argues, could break the industry's two-year innovation cycle.

“When everybody was upgrading from feature phones to smartphones, contract manufacturers had a huge chance to grow fast along with that upgrade cycle, and so did Android. Everyone gained from it, consumers included — back then products were upgraded every six months. Every six months there was new technology: higher-resolution screens, three cameras, faster processors. Consumers watched innovation arrive in front of them. That really was a good era. But now people upgrade every two years instead of every six months, and innovation keeps coming all the same, so they cram all of it into the S7, then cram it into the S8. That's what happens every two years now.”

This does look friendlier than Apple's Lightning standard.

But that is not a reason for accessory makers to support it.

The phone with the most accessories is still the iPhone, whether you count cases or smart peripherals.

To become an Apple accessory partner, a company has to get through the tedious MFi (Made for iPhone) certification, and to sell in retail stores it has to pay a fee up front and then hand Apple a cut of every sale. Accessory makers still swarm to it, because they want the iPhone's hundreds of millions of users.

Zoom, which sells microphones for a living, and Sony, with its cameras, are both willing to build custom external accessories for the iPhone. The reason is simple: the iPhone has more than 600 million users, and those users are more willing to spend money on accessories.

That is Essential's problem too. Pushing any standard depends first on having enough phone users — which draws in enough accessory buyers, which draws in accessory makers.

Rubin knows this. He said that in the early days Essential will build five or six pieces of hardware itself, and then, once the phone reaches scale, attract more accessory makers — if it can reach that scale.

In software, the field he knows best, Rubin wants to build a new operating system — just not for phones

After more than a decade in phones, what Andy Rubin is best at is software.

Before Android, he founded Danger and built his first phone product, the T-Mobile Sidekick. The device was about the size of a soap box, had a keyboard, could make calls, install apps and go online, and had its own app store. At the time it was a niche but iconic product.

The app store was the Sidekick's most important feature. That was 2002, six years before Apple launched its own App Store.

“Today maybe one engineer in ten has heard of Danger. But a lot of what goes into a modern smartphone, we did first on the Sidekick,” said Chris Desalvo, an engineer who worked at Danger then and later followed Rubin to Google.

After that, Rubin built Android.

Looking back, it is easy to treat Android as a product that was bound to succeed, since Google is the world's largest internet company.

The truth was far messier. When Rubin was building Android, Google had no experience with operating systems and none with hardware projects. This company, today the world's second most valuable, was then nowhere near as profitable as Microsoft, Nokia or BlackBerry.

Support for Android from the people running Google's own services was also thin. Vic Gundotra, the executive in charge of mobile services, still believed, in the second year after Android phones went on sale, that Google's future lay in moving its services onto the iPhone. In the first few years the Gmail team wouldn't even spare the people to build an Android app, so the Android team built one itself. Not until Android 3.0 did the project have a full design team.

In the end the small team Rubin led stood out among the crowd of new systems chasing the iPhone, beating products from BlackBerry, Nokia, Microsoft and Palm — and only then did it win Google's full backing.

Rubin is one of very few people who have led the development of an entire operating system.

Yet when he founded Essential, he did not do what the xxUI and xxOS skins you know do: rework Android's look, add a few minor features and announce a new system. The Essential phone keeps the look of stock Android; Rubin feels there isn't much left to change. From what is known so far, it is as “clean” as a Google phone.

“Your phone is your home screen, and Android does that well. You know, yesterday — really, just yesterday — I was driving, I stopped at a red light, and there was a car behind me. The light turned green, but it was the turn arrow. I let off the brake and then put it back on, because I wasn't moving, I was going straight. The guy behind me had his phone in his hand, staring at the screen, and the moment he saw my brake lights go out he hit the gas and rear-ended me, wrecking my car. Basically everyone texts or does something else on the phone while driving, all the time. It's that common. There's a kind of fatigue now — consumer fatigue.”

Rubin also has his own view of the artificial intelligence and machine learning everyone is talking about:

“Think about how artificial intelligence and machine learning actually work. Their technical architecture is different from ours. We have a brain, eyes, ears; we move around, take in and burn calories, and produce the energy that keeps the human body running. Each of us is a relatively independent individual, and the communication bandwidth between us is very low. Say your brain and my brain are talking: I can speak, you can write, and I can read what you wrote — but that is far slower than the exchange between two computers, which travels at high speed over fiber. What's really interesting about AI is that its technical architecture is completely different from ours. In the future an AI's brain may sit in the cloud, but it will have eyes and ears distributed everywhere, passing information between them at the speed of light. AI's technical architecture is more advanced — the way it moves information is closer to how humans do it.”

Essential did build an operating system anyway, Ambient OS, to connect the devices around the phone.

Announced alongside the phone was an Echo-like smart home speaker, Essential Home, which runs Ambient OS. Voice commands let users switch appliances on and off, play music, set alarms and so on. Rubin hopes the home smart hubs from Apple, Amazon and Google will work with his Essential Home.

But now that the three biggest consumer technology companies each have a system of their own, why would they work with Andy Rubin's?

For accessory makers like Philips and IKEA, which make smart light bulbs, adding Andy Rubin on top of Apple, Google and Amazon would not be hard. But they are unlikely to bother before they see users.

Little is known yet about Ambient OS. Whatever it does, it still won't work without phone users behind it.

In today's phone industry, scale is the biggest barrier

The PH-1 looks different from most Android phones on sale, and it is a high-end product. But a great deal of it feels familiar.

The phone market is mature now: Qualcomm Snapdragon chips, Corning Gorilla Glass, Sony camera modules…

The upside is that these parts don't go to a single manufacturer, so a new company can get started fast. The downside is that every company's products are much the same.

It is like the traditional home appliance market, where companies build products to nearly identical specs and the difference between them is the brand.

At that point distribution, branding and manufacturing count for more than the product.

Unlike traditional appliance makers, though, the biggest phone companies have not stopped spending on technology. Apple and Samsung still use product differences aggressively to squeeze their rivals.

Andy Rubin says he runs a small company with small production volumes, and that its advantage in innovating is being able to go straight to the labs for new materials and new technology and put them in its own phones. When it can't find a lab like that, it has to use off-the-shelf solutions.

But what happens next is easy to predict: the moment a new technology matters enough that Apple or Samsung want it, they will be the first to use it.

Take Touch ID, the press-to-read fingerprint sensor. Apple bought AuthenTec, the company that owned the technology, for $356 million in 2012, and put it in the iPhone a year later. That put Apple more than a year ahead of every competitor.

Apple now designs its own CPUs and the chips in the AirPods. It even designed the equipment that polishes the casing of the jet-black iPhone. Next it will design its own GPUs and mobile baseband processors.

Samsung does more still. Besides all kinds of chips, it makes most of the world's curved OLED screens, which have become an important point of differentiation for the Galaxy line.

Competition in the phone industry has grown white-hot all the way up at the component level. Even a competitor the size of Xiaomi has a hard time getting hold of genuinely useful new technology.

Even with the full-screen front design that is popular today, the real breakthrough will come from these two companies. Expect them to be the first to put fingerprint recognition inside the display area, which would let them drop the “chin” altogether and stop putting the sensor on the back.

In a market this mature, it is simply too hard for a new company to fight Apple and Samsung over new technology and hope to stand out on the product. That is probably why the new phone Essential has brought out doesn't look all that different after all.

After the Essential phone was announced, Rubin appeared at a conference held by the tech outlet Recode, in conversation with Walt Mossberg, the veteran tech journalist who was about to retire.

Mossberg: “So you don't care about scale?” Andy Rubin: “I want to reach a certain scale, but I want to grow along with the supply chain…” (cut off by the next question) Mossberg: “So do you want to reach scale?” Andy Rubin: “Of course. But it takes time.”

The question is whether a market this mature will give a new company enough time.

Cover image/Essential, The Verge