Wileyfox

» see wileyfox.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

for a stretch of years, cyanogenmod was what you put on a phone to get the manufacturer off it. you unlocked the bootloader and gave up the warranty, and what came back was a handset that did what you told it. i knew that world the way most engineers of my generation knew it, as something you did on a saturday to a phone you had already stopped worrying about breaking.

Wileyfox was the company that tried to sell that from a shop. It launched in august 2015 out of London, owned by the Meridian Group, with two handsets running Cyanogen OS 12.1 from the factory. The Swift was £129 and the Storm was £199, both dual SIM, aimed at the british buyer who pays for a phone outright instead of renting one from a carrier for two years.

The Swift was the cheapest Cyanogen OS device in western europe when it shipped. That was the entire proposition, and for about a year it was a good one.

~ the case file ~

~ the bet ~

The bet was that Cyanogen Inc. would become a third force in mobile operating systems. Not Google's Android and not Apple, but Android with the Google layer loosened, sold by a company whose leadership was publicly talking about taking Android away from Google.

For a small hardware company with no operating system of its own, licensing that was cheaper than building one and more interesting than shipping the same skin as every other budget brand. It also meant the most distinctive thing about a Wileyfox phone was made by somebody else entirely.

~ the slide ~

Cyanogen came apart during 2016. The company shed staff and stopped being an operating system business, and the licensing arrangements that partners had built products around stopped being viable. Wileyfox moved its phones onto stock Android, and by the third generation the Swift 2 line shipped Android 7.1.1 with nothing unusual sitting on top of it.

What that left was a budget android phone from a brand nobody had heard of two years earlier, competing on price against Chinese manufacturers with far better supply chains. The founders left in 2017. The money ran out after them.

~ what it became ~

Wileyfox Europe Limited went into administration on 6 february 2018, two and a half years after the first phone shipped. Quantuma was appointed to handle it. The reporting that week was blunt about the cause, which was simply that the company had no money left.

The brand did not vanish immediately. On 19 march 2018 the Santok Group took a license covering handset sales in europe and south africa, which kept the name in circulation and kept after sales support alive for anyone still holding a Swift. It faded out of the market after that without a second death notice.

wileyfox.com still loads today, and it redirects to santok.com. The last thing the domain does is point at the group that licensed the name off the wreck.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »