Solana CEO Anatoly Says His Saga Phone Is Surely Competition for Apple and Google

The opportunity is there.

Solana phone

Solana announced plans for its Saga flagship phone four months ago and as the launch date nears there is more information coming out. During Disrupt 2022 Anatoly Yakovenko, the founder of Solana Labs spoke more on the impending launch of the phone.

“Our goal isn’t to sell 10 million unites, we would be very happy with 25,000 to 50,000 unites sold in the next year, that would be awesome!” he stated during a panel.The founder stated how the phone is more of a tool to attract developers and that introducing the phone was more of a “developer play.”

Anatoly  has spent a lot of his career working with Qualcomm and helped major firms create their own mobile phones so he is no rookie when it comes to cellphones and services. Yakovenko stated that those projects did fail but instead stated that creation of the phone now is not as digitally intensive as it was before.

Web3 and the big tech firms

Anatoly spoke on a web3 distribution channel for mobile crypto developers and opening up opportunities to build experiences outside of just using a laptop. Anatoly spoke on users not having to sign up on different applications to create a crypto transaction. These simple movements are what are needed to build attention and adoption of crypto and web3 technology.

The Solana CEO spoke on an imaginary situation having 50k to 100k trade daily on platforms on the phone and how that number is lucrative for the hundreds of developers out there with millions of users possible for a lot of small niche groups. The CEO spoke again on how the web3 phone will allow creators of content and platforms to enable digital ownership rights to both the organizations and users, this is different from having to pay a 30% tax on sales like you have to with Apple.

“The idea of true digital ownership means the digital items have to be treated like physical ones, and this isn’t something Apple or Google are built around” stated Yakovenko. The system of Apple or Google is more like renting a space where the two tech giants are more like a landlord. Anatoly spoke of how web3 would be dangerous for Google or Apple to fully adopt due to the fact that the tenements of web3 and true digital ownership is a disruption to the already lucrative business models they employ. Apple taking 30% from developers is too good for them to give up at the moment it would seem.

Opportunity and Strategy

This presents Saga with a great opportunity, the ability to break into the cellphone business by providing an offering that does what both Google and Apple fail to do – give ownership back to the user. The developers that don’t want to deal with Google or Apple and their fees will jump towards Saga.

The team at Solana plan to give Saga the ability to implement digital asset products and services enabling users to transact crypto right through the device, thus removing the need to do trading or purchasing of NFTs through a laptop only.

Anatoly believes that as crypto grows there may be a way for Apple and Google to finally change their ways but before that happens the Saga phone has its own niche that may just change things.

 

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