Essential PH-1. image: Essential Products

Essential Products, a smartphone startup founded by Android creator and former Google executive Andy Rubin, has announced it’ll be ceasing operations and winding down after struggling to win customers in a highly competitive smartphone market. The Palo Alto-based company, which was founded in 2015, had raised $330 million in funding (Crunchbase data) from well-known investors such as Tencent, Amazon, and Redpoint prior to this announcement.

Essential’s first product was an Android smartphone dubbed PH-1. It was announced in 2017 but discontinued a year later amid reports of poor sales. Essential began working on another unique kind of smartphone dubbed “Project GEM“, which was unveiled late last year but hadn’t gone into production and apparently won’t given Essential is shutting down.

Essential’s “Project GEM”. image: Essential Products

Essential founder Andy Rubin. image: Joi Ito on Flickr, under CC BY 2.0 license

“Despite our best efforts, we’ve now taken Gem as far as we can and regrettably have no clear path to deliver it to customers.” Essential’s announcement said. “Given this, we have made the difficult decision to cease operations and shutdown Essential.”

Owners of Essential’s PH-1 smartphone will still be able to use them but won’t get additional software updates or customer support. Essential will also keep alive open-source software developed for the PH-1 on its GitHub page.