It is a relative small company which is catering the DIY market. To build any substantial user base with industrial applications, I guess their way is to continue to be open and enable people to build DIY stuff and a tiny fraction of these will one day build products with ESP chips inside.
They are in a -lot- of edge devices. They became popular with DIY because they were a very cheap and capable option with the esp8266, which hackers converted from ultracheap UART to WiFi modules into general purpose mcus. They became the DIY default because instead of ignoring this, they embraced it and published specs and translated data sheets. Their diy friendly approach has garnered them a ton of software support and publicity.
They have responded very openly by publishing the vendor specific diagnostic commands.
This whole dog and pony show is very unfortunate, really, since the irresponsible security firm used the term backdoor in a completely inappropriate and misleading way, and the blogosphere and tech press just parroted their claim without bothering to read the disclosure, apparently.
The headlines should have been:
“Security firm Tarlogic makes specious “backdoor” claim at rootCon about popular Bluetooth/Wifi microcontroller deployed in billions of devices.”
I've in no way surveyed the whole wifi mcu market. But wasn't the "beginnings" of Espressif in the western world that it was a cheap wifi mcu that was at the time very popular in cheap Chinese wifi enabled products.
The DIY market (at least in the west) came later. I still remember reading the hackaday article about them being discovered back in the day - https://hackaday.com/2014/08/26/new-chip-alert-the-esp8266-w... and back then all the documentation was in Chinese.
I remember a ton of cheap Chinese wifi enabled stuff would come with an esp for a good while, until even cheaper wifi chips hit the market.
The biggest factor (IMO) is that during the pandemic chip shortages, about the only WiFi/BT module in stock anywhere was espressif. They consistently had stock when no one else did, so a lot of home hackers got into it.
As our industry is so fond of forgetting and rediscovering, if your product is easy and accessible to home hackers, it will be used in those hackers' real jobs.
But also they're so goddamn cheap. Espressif somehow scaled production super fast and got the price way below any of the competition.
> It is a relative small company which is catering the DIY market.
Is that really all it is? I’ve got multiple IOT devices from major vendors that use esp32. I’ve also seen multiple EV chargers that leverage the platform.
Yeah, according to most of the articles reporting on this there are over a billion ESP32s out there. I suspect that the 1 billion number is actually counting the ESP8266 as well, but still there are a lot of them and I see them used in a lot of "real" products.
