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

After 12 years of being an Android OEM, LG is fed up. The Korean company announced last night that it is officially leaving the smartphone market; it plans to close the doors of the entire business by July 31, 2021.

The news does not come as a surprise, as LG has been preparing the public for this decision for some time. LG’s mobile division had 23 consecutive quarters of financial losses and its last profitable year was in 2014. In January 2020, the then new CEO of LG Electronics, Kwon Bong-seok, promised that the troubled division would be profitable in 2021. That The message was apparently “profitability or bankruptcy” because, in January 2021, LG was warning the public that it would have to “make a cold judgment” about the future of the mobile division. Local media reports say LG exploited the division’s sale but was unable to find a buyer.

It is unclear what will happen to what appears to be “LG’s last smartphone”, the LG Rollable. The flexible screen smartphone was announced at CES 2021, and while the expanding screen mechanism was identical to other companies’ concepts and prototypes, LG promised that the phone would actually be launched in “early 2021”. The LG press release did not reveal what will happen to the Rollable, but rumors saying the phone could be canceled began to circulate almost immediately after the announcement. We will not hold our breath.

A decade of losers, tricks and dead devices

LG phones have never been good. The company hesitated between building exactly what Samsung was building – but with less marketing and brand awareness – and building absurdly attractive phones, with no justification behind them. Who could forget the smelly ones like the LG G Flex in 2013, which used flexible screen technology to create a curved telephone. The whole body was shaped like a banana for no reason. LG repeated this error in 2015 with the LG G Flex 2 – again, for no apparent reason. The LG V10 in 2015 had an extra small 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 had a removable bottom that enabled a modular accessory ecosystem. You can replace the battery, attach it to the camera handle with a shutter button, or connect a new audio DAC to get better sound from your headphones. The 2019 “LG V50 ThinQ 5G” had a second dockable screen. The LG Wing in 2020 was a T-shaped smartphone, where the main screen could flip over on its side to reveal another smaller screen underneath.

When LG was not launching ridiculous phone designs, the company’s most normal phones could never answer the question “why would I buy this instead of a Samsung phone?” Both LG and Samsung produced heavy-skinned Android phones with the latest specifications, but if the phones were almost identical, there was no reason not to buy the Samsung phone, which had much more sales and marketing force behind it. LG’s biggest contributions to the market, if you want to be really generous, were making the first 1440p smartphone (the LG G3) and the first extra wide-angle camera (the LG G5). Both demonstrate LG’s typical inability to create a smartphone killer feature. None of the features was a solid enough reason to buy an LG smartphone.

Even when people chose an LG phone, LG did its best to ensure that they would never again be LG’s customers. For years, the company has produced defective smartphones that died prematurely due to poor build quality. A defective solder on the phone’s motherboards would cause the phone’s memory to disconnect and the phones would not be able to successfully initialize. After years of complaints, the company’s low-quality craftsmanship earned him a series of collective “boot loop” lawsuits covering the G4, V10, G5, V20 and Nexus 5X. Even if your LG phone did not die prematurely, you were probably angry with the company for its atrocious Android update support, which often resulted in nine months of waiting time for updates. The company even once claimed to have launched the “LG Software Update Center” to try to fix its horrible update image, which resulted in absolutely no change and quickly became the target of community jokes.

The company’s most successful devices were its collaborations with Google through the Nexus program, but even so, many of these phones (even if not included in the process) ended up dying prematurely due to the LG boot-loop fiasco and other problems of poor labor that led to premature death. LG co-branded Nexus 4, (2012), Nexus 5 (2013) and Nexus 5X (2015) for Google, along with the manufacturer’s anonymous work on the Pixel 2 XL.

LG will leave a considerable gap in the prepaid and midsize shovelware market, which accounted for most of the 10% market share it had in the United States. This is likely to be swallowed 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 pile of companies that could not hack it in the smartphone market. TO TEAR APART.