Andy Rubin announced a few years ago that he was working on a different smartphone than what we could find at that time in the market. That product was the Essential PH-1, a smartphone that did not receive the approval of the media and therefore, from users, which is why it only launched one model on the market.
But beyond the relative failure of the PH-1, despite the work that Rubin had put into that product, the company continued to work on a different new smartphone called the GEM. GEM was a smartphone that was announced last August but that has not finally seen the light and has been the nail in the coffin of the company.
GEM showed us a smartphone elongated and narrow with which, once again, Rubin wanted to revolutionize the market. This idea, unlike the PH-1, was firefighter and did not make any sense in the current telephony landscape, where the market is still oriented towards larger screens with smaller and thinner frames, and where an elongated and narrow screen does not it made no sense beyond a very specific niche (presumably there would be).
The Essential PH-1 was introduced in February 2017, and became the first smartphone with notch on the market (The iPhone X was introduced in September of that same year). This terminal has always been one of the first, both in 2018 and 2019, to update to new versions of Android, since the customization layer is practically non-existent.
The smartphone will continue to work without any problem, only that you will not receive any type of update again, or security of any other kind. Andy Rubin, co-founder of Android, left Google in 2008 to dedicate himself to developing hardware, the Essential being the first mass product that he launched on the market.