Essential Phone (PH-1) will not receive updates anymore as company is shutting down

Andy Rubin, one of the cofounders of Android, parted ways with Android and brought in a new smartphone under the name Essential.

Essential Phone PH-1 is probably the first smartphone to have a notch in the display to house the camera module. It was released back in 2017 and, was criticized for its design back then.

But, according to a recent development, the quintessential smartphone company is now shutting down. Meaning that it won’t be releasing a new phone any further. This also means that the company will stop providing security or firmware updates for the Essential phone.

The February update which was pushed on February 3, 2020, for the PH-1 was the last update the device received. Though the smartphone will continue to work without the support of software updates from the Essential team.essnet

This announcement was made on the official blog on Essential’s website and below are some of the important mentions from the blog:

As part of the company wind down, the security update for PH-1 released on February 3 is the last update from the Essential software team. Your PH-1 will continue to work but we will not be providing any additional updates or customer support. Current Newton Mail users will have access to the service through April 30, 2020. For developer fans, a prebuilt of our vendor image and everything else needed to keep hacking on PH-1 will be hosted on our Github.

(Source)

However, the company will be providing the vendor image and everything else on GitHub, which means that custom ROMs will still be an option.

Moreover, the Project GEM which was the new phone teased a while back by Andy Rubin as a successor to the PH-1, will not see the light of the day. In fact, the users of the email service called Newton mail will be able to access the service till April 30, 2020.

So, with that, a promising company bites the dust and if you own an Essential Phone then, it is time to switch over to something else as there will be no customer support for the device.

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