LG never really recovered after releasing several phones with bootlooping issues between 2015-16: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_smartphone_bootloop_issues

Plus their software support was poor, even for the era.

My first LG ended up being my last LG because it was defective. Screen issues started popping up about a year after purchase. Sending it in repairs didn't accomplish anything. They probably returned the same phone to me untouched since the screen issues would go away if the phone wasn't used for a few weeks (but it would always come back). While other people had similar issues, LG never acknowledged the problem. It was not confidence inspiring.

In terms of what the phone delivered between software and hardware: it was a wonderful phone, but I lacked confidence in the brand to buy another.

In contrast, I have never had a defective phone from another company. Heck, I've only had two phones that ended up with cracked screens (and those were clearly my fault).

I liked my LG phones until I broke a screen and the cost to get a replacement was absurd because noone has them in stock.

I am still kind of shocked that the non-leading manufacturers haven't standardized on hardware. Every company besides Apple, google, and Samsung, should get together and create the beige box computer of cell phones, you can get influencers modding them, gamers overclocking, etc. all the things that keep the desktop market alive.

Instead of working together, every one of these companies acts like a greedy monopoly when they don't have monopolistic powers, or even any soft form of lock-in. Even if all they did was make phones that had easy to replace standardized screens and batteries. I could see them quickly making in-roads in corporate IT, and for kids.

But none of them want to work together, so we get iphones, a few higher end iphone ripoffs, and a bunch of low end iphone ripoffs.

edit: I'm also mad that I lost my cat S61, and that the S62 looks like everything else.

edit 2: I also hate that I switched to an iphone, and how comfortably easy it was to get full locked-in in two years.

LG got it right with the original Nexus 4, although battery life was a problem for all phones in that era. That phone had everything in a small form factor and it also came with a glass back that enabled the phone to fall off a perfectly level service, which was rectified with a little rubber piece.

The Nexus 4 should have lofted LG into the big league and the Nexus 4 owner should have graduated to a LG flagship. But this didn't happen, in part because people stayed with Google and moved on to what would become the Pixel series.

The problem with smartphones is that they are ultimately 'hand rectangles' and the average customer only needs adequate rather than super-deluxe. For a while it was possible to compete on features, battery life and mega-pixels, for people to queue outside phone retailers to be first with the new status-symbol-gadget. But times changed as the tech matured.

Most people couldn't care less about their phone specifications, so long as it works. Getting the latest and greatest phone makes as much sense as on insisting on the latest model of hand basin or the most hi-tech garden trowel. Who cares apart from reviewers or people with little going on in their lives.

I really liked the G2 as well. It was the first phone (at least that I saw) to put the power and volume buttons on the back of the phone, where a ton of later phones would eventually start putting the fingerprint sensor.

I replaced LG's ROM with CyanogenMod back in the day, and it was such a smooth experience. The main reason I moved on from it was because I cracked the screen and the replacement screen I got (installed by a local repair shop) had a touch sensitivity issue along the top edge.

I can't really speak for other Android users, but in those eras I either owned or was paying more attention to the HTC, Samsung, Motorola, Pixel, etc. phones because of their aftermarket OS support.

The impression I got was "too many parts, too much to go wrong, too expensive to build".

It doesn't rule out that other people might have better ideas, but it does suggest why LG decided it wasn't worth it.

I think the article gets at it indirectly: a complex mechanism with multiple motors, tracks, arms, etc, substantially more complicated and thus more failure-prone than any folding phone ever and also substantially more expensive to make.