Solana sells just 2,500 Saga phones, chief hints your iPhone should stay

Solana creator Anatoly Yakovenko says the company has only sold a tenth of the Saga phones it needs to sell to decide whether or not it has a core user base.

Speaking to Unchained, Yakovenko confirmed that the company has sold somewhere in the region of 2,500 phones but needs to shift between 25,000 and 50,000 before developers start to come on board and create applications for the handset.

According to Yakovenko, there are internal discussions happening within the company to decide the best course of action but he hinted that the phone’s future may be as a much cheaper secondary device for iPhone users looking for a smart wallet. Yakovenko himself says he uses an iPhone for work and his Saga phone as his “NFT phone.”

The Solana chief also hinted that the changing tech landscape will have an influence on the phone’s future — if it has one.

“What’s also changed over the last year and a half is that mobile interfaces like progressive web apps and passkeys, have really shrunk the difference between a dedicated device to the kind of tools that developers can use to get that experience on a regular phone,” he told Unchained.

“Progressive web apps bypass the app store so that developers don’t need to pay the fees. Passkeys that work on Android and IOS let the user skip the seed phrase generating part completely even though you don’t get a trusted display that gives you that full wallet security your surface area is shrunk dramatically. You’re not dealing with seed phrases anymore.

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“We have to decide if there’s a place for a smart wallet, a much cheaper version that an iPhone user could use as a secondary device. We haven’t seen a ton of signal whether that’s a compelling enough thing to sell 50,000 units.”

Yakovenko also addressed suggestions of a vulnerability with the device. “There was not,” he said. “There absolutely was not. There was the weirdest report. They rooted the phone and they showed a Bitcoin wallet that they hacked. Solana Stack does not support Bitcoin, it was the most bizarre thing.

“Whatever that company was, I wouldn’t use them for security analysis.”

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