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Smartisan founder’s dream of beating Apple dies as ByteDance suspends smartphone business
- Entrepreneur Luo Yonghao, founder of Smartisan, once boasted of surpassing Apple’s innovation in smartphones and other devices
- By 2019, Luo was scrambling to pay off Smartisan’s debts amid an economic slowdown in China
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ByteDance, owner of short video-sharing apps TikTok and Douyin, has suspended development of smartphones under the Smartisan brand to refocus on its Dali line of hardware products for the education sector.
New Stone Lab, the hardware project team that leads research and development at Smartisan, will be folded into the group behind ByteDance’s Dali smart lamp to create new education hardware products, according to a spokeswoman for the Beijing-based company.
“Service to [existing] Smartisan users will not be affected,” the spokeswoman said on Monday. “We will continue to explore the innovation opportunities of Smartisan OS to give users a better experience.”
That restructuring, which was first reported by Chinese media outlet LatePost citing anonymous sources, will have Louis Yang, the co-founder of social media app Musical.ly that was acquired by ByteDance in 2017, head the expanded education hardware group. Yang will report to Chen Lin, education business leader at ByteDance and former chief executive of the Beijing-based company’s Jinri Toutiao news platform, according to LatePost.
ByteDance’s move has ended the dream of entrepreneur Luo Yonghao, who founded Android smartphone maker Smartisan Technology in 2012, to surpass Apple’s innovation in smartphones and other devices.
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