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British developer Canonical managed to break crowdfunding records on the site Indiegogo but still failed to reach the goal by around £12.8 million.
Many big organisations jumped into the crowdfunding offers and even Bloomberg donated £51,000 to the cause. CTO Mark Shuttleworth said that everyone will get their money back in the next week.
Fortunately people will still be able to use Ubuntu phones, regardless of the funding shortfall for the Edge phone.
CTO Shuttleworth said “So ends a crazy month. We've broken records, we've been written and talked about across the world, we've worn out our F5 keys, and we've learned a lot of invaluable lessons about crowdfunding.”
He added “Our bold campaign to build a visionary new device ultimately fell short, but we can take away so many positives. The big winner from this campaign is Ubuntu. While we passionately wanted to build the Edge to showcase Ubuntu on phones, the support and attention it received will still be a huge boost as other Ubuntu phones start to arrive in 2014.
Thousands of you clearly want to own an Ubuntu phone and believe in our vision of convergence, and rest assured you won't have much longer to wait.”
The Ubuntu Edge broke crowdfunding records on the first day of the campaign, raising £2.2 million in just 24 hours. After this, the contributions slowed down. Canonical pushed hard for the investment donations in the last days of the campaign, but they fell short of the $32 million goal.
The Ubuntu Edge was going to have a 4.5 inch 1,280 x 720 HD screen with a pure sapphire crystal touchscreen, rather than glass.
Kitguru says: A success story in many regards, but the funding demand was very high.
I am genuinely really gutted about this 🙁