After a decade of failure, LG officially leaves the smartphone market

After twelve years of being an Android OEM, LG has had enough. The Korean company announced late last night that it was officially leaving the smartphone market; it plans to close the entire business by 31 July 2021.

The news does not come as much of a surprise, as LG has been preparing the public for this decision for some time. LG’s mobile division had 23 consecutive quarters of money losses, and its last profitable year was in 2014. In January 2020, LG Electronics’ then-brand new CEO, Kwon Bong-seok, promised that the troublesome division would be profitable by 2021. a message was apparently ‘profitability’, as LG had warned the public by January 2021 that it would have to make a cold judgment about the future of the mobile division. Local media reports claim that LG investigated the sale of the division but could not find any buyer.

It’s not clear what will happen to what feels like ‘LG’s latest smartphone’, the LG Rollable. The flexible smartphone was announced at CES 2021, and although the expansion display mechanism was identical to concepts and prototypes of other companies, LG promised that the phone would only launch in early 2021. LG’s press release did not reveal what will happen to the Rollable, but rumors that the phone could be canceled start almost immediately after it was announced. We do not hold our breath.

A decade of also-ransom, gimmicks and dead devices

LG’s phones were never good. The company was a ping-pong between building exactly what Samsung built – but with less marketing and brand recognition – and building wildly attractive gimmicks without any background. Who could forget stinkers like the LG G Flex in 2013, who used flexible display technology to create a bent phone. The whole body is shaped like a banana for no reason. LG repeated this mistake in 2015 with the LG G Flex 2 – again, for no apparent reason. The LG V10 in 2015 had a small extra screen above the main screen so you could see the icons or the time (so, just like the main screen?). The LG G5 in 2016 has a removable bottom that enabled a modular accessory ecosystem. You can replace the battery, press a camera grip with a release button, or attach a new audio DAC for better headphone sound. The ‘LG V50 ThinQ 5G’ of 2019 has a second screen attached. The LG Wing in 2020 was a T-shaped smartphone, where the main screen could rotate sideways to reveal another smaller screen underneath.

When LG did not put up ridiculous phone designs, the company’s normal phones could never answer the question, “why would I buy them instead of a Samsung phone?” LG and Samsung both pumped out Android phones with strong skin with the latest specifications, but if the phones were both almost identical, there was no reason not to buy the Samsung phone. The biggest contribution to LG if you really want to be generous was to make the first 1440p smartphone (the LG G3) and the first extra wide-angle camera (the LG G5). Both show LG’s typical inability to devise a killer smartphone feature. No feature was a good reason to buy an LG smartphone.

Even when people chose an LG phone, LG did its best to make sure they would never be LG customers again. The company has been manufacturing defective smartphones for years that died early due to poor build quality. Faulty soldering on the motherboard of the phone may cause the memory of the phone to disconnect, and the phones may not start successfully. After years of complaints, the company’s fraudulent workmanship has led to a series of “boot loop” lawsuits for the G4, V10, G5, V20 and Nexus 5X. Even if your LG phone did not die early, you were probably angry with the company for the heinous support of Android updates, which often had a nine month wait for updates. The company even once claimed to have launched the ‘LG Software Upgrade Center’ to try and repair its awful update image, which resulted in absolutely no changes and quickly became the measure of the community’s jokes.

The company’s most successful devices were the collaboration with Google through the Nexus program, but even though many of the phones (even if not included in the lawsuit) die an early death due to LG’s boot-running failure and other problems with poor workmanship that led to an early death. LG gets co-brands on the Nexus 4, (2012), Nexus 5 (2013) and Nexus 5X (2015) for Google, along with anonymous manufacturing work on the Pixel 2 XL.

LG will leave a significant gap in the prepaid kickwear market, which accounts for the bulk of the ten percent market share in the US. It will probably be picked up quickly by Samsung or a Chinese OEM.

LG joins Blackberry, Nokia, Motorola, Essential, Facebook, Amazon, Mozilla, Microsoft, Acer, Palm, Panasonic, Toshiba, HP, LeEco, Nextbit, Dell, Gigabyte, Ericsson, and many others in the hope companies that could not not cut it in the smartphone market. TEAR.

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