Essential reportedly cut around 30% of its employees

By Joe Maring
last updated

It's no secret that Essential's been faced with rough waters for the past few months, but things appear to be worse than some might have expected. According to a report from Bloomberg, the Andy Rubin startup has now let go about 30% of its entire workforce.

Essential's hardware and sales teams were the main focus of these cuts, and in an email, a spokeswoman for Essential said the following:

This has been a difficult decision to make. We are very sorry for the impact on our colleagues who are leaving the company and are doing everything we can to help them with their future careers. We are confident that our sharpened product focus will help us deliver a truly game changing consumer product.

That "truly game changing consumer product" likely refers to the AI-focused device that we learned about earlier in the month. That report claimed that Essential's next smartphone will primarily be focused around artificial intelligence and voice commands — creating a phone that knows what you want to do and results in you spending less time looking at a screen.

This mystery phone could be unveiled as soon as CES next January, but don't hold your breath for it quite yet. Essential's already canceled the Essential Phone 2 and its Essential Home in months prior, and now with this round of staff cuts, the company's future is more uncertain than ever before.

Essential is reportedly making a phone based primarily on voice commands

Joe Maring
Joe Maring

Joe Maring was a Senior Editor for Android Central between 2017 and 2021. You can reach him on Twitter at @JoeMaring1.

10 Comments
  • Never good news but hopefully the next ones a hit.
  • You don't make a huge cut if you are expecting that success. Seems like they are going out of business by the end of the next year.
  • You make that cut if your sales don't support your operating costs. You don't make the cut to be able to continue to operate if you are not hoping for success.
  • This
  • Wish them the best of luck. Bought and enjoyed the Essential Phone; it had very good hardware and a very nice stock Android experience for the price I paid when I got it. I think they can hold on and potentially succeed if they target a little under the flagship category, go for the best possible pure Android device in the roughly $450-500 range. People aren't buying into it when their alternatives are Samsung or iPhone flagships.
  • Snagged the Essential phone on the big $224 sale, so I'm sad to see this company die this quickly. It was not a good enough phone though. I kept coming back to my Pixel XL which was almost a year older. The company had a problems from the beginning with their poor communication. You don't get to come in stumbling as a new brand and expect to survive.
  • I'm glad the company died quick. Andy Rubin is a complete idiot for trying to sell a featureless half baked device for a premium price tag. Only Apple can get away with that. Should be a good lesson for other companies not to follow. Even though Google is doing it now with the pixel which will is already a fail..
  • +1 point for the last comment
  • Google seems to be doing fine
  • I cannot say I am too surprised. They are basically down to support of only one established product and development of one new one. Definitely not a fun time for them, and I hope they can rise up from the setback.