Another year, another proclamation from LG that its flagship smartphone isn't selling as well as expected. Last year it was the LG G5, when the company blamed a bad quarter on "weak sales of [the] G5." The year before that, it was the LG G4, which had sales that "fell short of expectations." This year it's the LG G6—in its latest earnings report, LG blamed the "challenging" quarter on “weaker than expected premium smartphone sales and increase in component costs.”

As a whole, LG is doing fine, with the company reporting that "three of the company’s four main business units reported higher revenues than a year ago." Home Appliances, Home Entertainment, and Vehicle components are the three seeing improvements, while the mobile division is lagging behind.

LG's strategy with the G6 never made a ton of sense, seeming like it was only aiming for "second place" behind Samsung. LG launched the G6 in 2017 but used Qualcomm's old 2016 SoC, the Snapdragon 821. At the launch event for the G6, LG said it shipped last year's SoC in this year's phone in a bid to get to market faster than the Snapdragon 835 devices. By the time LG finally got around to launching the G6 in the US, though, it was already one week after the Galaxy S8 launch event. If LG had planned to beat Samsung and other Snapdragon 835 devices to market, that lead seemed to have evaporated at some point. The G6 technically had a three-week head start on the S8, but by the time the G6 was available, the S8 launch event already happened, the phone was unveiled, and Samsung was already taking preorders.

Like we said in our review of the G6, Samsung just built a better version of the same phone. The S8 and G6 are both high-end, $700-ish phones with slim bezel design, glass backs, and skinned versions of Android. They are both heavily sold through carriers. The Galaxy S8 looked more futuristic, had a better processor, and came with the usual dump truck full of Samsung extras (free VR goggles! An iris scanner! Desktop dock support!). The only advantage you could give the G6 is better fingerprint reader placement.

LG has also been taking a beating in the press thanks to lawsuits alleging its phones stop working earlier then they should. The $650 starting price was never competitive given the specs, and LG has been forced to slash the price of the G6 since launch. Today, you can buy the 64GB international version (original price of about $720) on Amazon for just $480.