Comment by ssl-3

They've been first at a few things.

For instance: Back in the Bad, Old Days, charging phones (especially smart phones) wasn't quite as simple as today.

The aftermarket cables were shit. Brands came and went overnight (they still do, but they did then too), and even if a person eventually found some cables that worked then it was hard to get more of them later.

The aftermarket charging bricks were shit. I had some that would make capacitive touchscreens go crazy. Some that barely worked. Some that got stinky-hot.

The phone might have a USB port that looked about like all the others, but that didn't mean much: Different phone models had different ways for signalling/confirming/accepting charging capabilities, and they rarely lined up with the method a random charging brick used.

Get the wrong combination on this double-locked mystery box, and it was possible to plug a phone and have it say it is charging -- even though the reported battery SoC is dropping before your eyes.

That was the market. It was fragmented and dysfunctional, and the only sane method to simply charge a phone was to use OE cables with OE power bricks, for real money.

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Then Anker showed up, kind of out of nowwhere. And they were all like "Uh, guys? We sell stuff that actually works."

And they were right. They put together cables that consistently didn't suck (which should not be hard, except...). They started selling charging bricks that worked well with most or all of the phones on the market -- fooling them into thinking they were talking to their OE brick so they'd behave themselves.

It had been a terrible mess. A complete crapshoot.

And then, Anker products just plugged in and worked. They did all the things they said they'd do.

They did it so well that they raised the bar for the entire industry.

And, nowadays, it's not so bad. It's easy-enough to get a reliable cable or a charging brick that isn't a complete turd from a variety of names. That's not a thing that most of us think about much, if at all.

But man, it was fucked up for a long time before Anker stuff became common.