Nextbit was founded in 2012 in San Francisco by Tom Moss and Mike Chan, both Android veterans from Google. In 2014, Scott Croyle, former HTC design lead, joined as Chief Design and Product Officer. Nextbit aimed to create "cloud-first" smartphones, integrating cloud storage directly into the OS.
Their most notable product was the Nextbit Robin, an Android smartphone that offered 32GB of local storage and 100GB of cloud storage. The phone intelligently managed storage by automatically backing up older files to the cloud and "graying out" the icons of infrequently used apps. Users could tap the grayed-out icon to retrieve the app and its data. The Robin also featured a unique design and was sold directly to consumers. In January 2017, Nextbit was acquired by Razer, a gaming hardware company. Following the acquisition, sales of the Robin were halted. Although a second product, the Robin 2, was in development, it never progressed past the prototype stage. Support for the Robin smartphone, including cloud storage, ended.
