Android co-creator, Andy Rubin, thinks that he has an advantage and that his new Essential smartphone can take on Apple and Google

Andy Rubin offered a very surprising answer at his company’s headquarters located in Silicon Valley this week: he was asked what does his new device have to compete with Apple or Samsung; his response was:

“Cycles of innovation shift when you have a saturated market, and this is really important to understand,” Rubin said. “So when people are at scale and they’re shipping hundreds of millions of devices a year and the market is saturated you’re in an upgrade market. You have to convince people to throw away their old phone and get a new phone, and that’s really hard to do when innovation doesn’t happen.”

He then explained that his company, Playground, seeks to focus on device margins, just as Apple does. Which means that, when he is not selling phones, he hopes that consumers are buying accessories for their devices.

“Every 18-24 months that you get rid of your current phone and get the next one,” Rubin said, “we’ve created inter-cycle opportunities with our accessory bus. In between those 18-24 months there’s new things. The reason we made a wireless accessory bus, if you look at other accessories with pins or modules that slide in and out, that means the exact same form factor has to be your next phone for you to take accessories with you. We can have a radically different form factor for our next phone, but you can still use your accessories. You need to think like that in a saturated market.” Rubin said

Source: cnbc.com