Google Is Doubling Down on Building Its Own Phones

By buying up HTC, Google is committing to the Pixel, and forging ahead into its past.

Google officially announced that it would buy HTC. For $1.1 billion, the search giant will be acquiring only only the Taiwan-based tech company, but also the engineering team that designed the terrific Google Pixel. That’s right: Google is buying up the very folks who made its flagship phone.

This isn’t a total surprise, since the Pixel went over quite well. But it is a little strange because, well, Google’s been down this road of buying a company that makes Android phones before, and it changed its mind. Buying up HTC means Google’s flagship Pixel phone is here to stay—and the decision might shake up the future of Android.

Unlike iPhones—which are pure Apple phones, designed chips-to-software by Tim Cook and company—the lineage of an Android phone is more complex. Google makes the Android software (to which your carrier adds its extra bloatware), but companies like Samsung and LG make the actual hardware and, accordingly, put their names on the phones. It’s the Samsung Galaxy S8, after all.

This approach has its pros and cons. Google gets its software (apps and services it uses to sell ads) in front of hundreds of millions of people without having to worry about hardware. And there are hundreds of Android phones: big, small, cheap, expensive, good, bad, something for every conceivable taste. This distribution of labor and flexibility lead to an Android explosion, and Google’s domination of the global market share.

It also means that Google doesn’t have the soup-to-nuts control of its product. That power is part of the reason that for years now iPhones have been undeniably more polished than their Android competitors, and why now, even though Android is slicker than ever, it is woefully vulnerable to security problems. Apple can just send out iOS updates, but Google needs to work with is many hardware partners and phone carriers to make that happen. As a result, woefully few Android phones run the latest, safest version of the software. A truly Google phone, like the Pixel, can fix that.

Google has toyed with the premise before, having purchased Motorola in 2012. But difficult relationships with hardware partners prevented Google from doing anything too wild. It released only two (terrific) Google-backed Motorola phones before selling off the company (though hanging onto some extremely valuable patents) and returning to its “Nexus” program—a partnership between Google and rotating hardware partners to create an “ideal” Android phone.

Google’s latest move to hire the HTC team responsible for the Pixel represents a renewed, serious push at creating the mythical “iPhone of Android.” But such a project will now encounter world that’s totally changed. With its voice-assistant “Bixby” and a growing suite of exclusive apps, Google’s most formidable hardware partner, Samsung, is increasingly striking it out on its own, shifting users away from the Google services the search giant uses to make money even while it sticks with Android at the core. Meanwhile, the Pixel will push its users deeper and deeper into Google’s web, offering things like limitless Google Photos storage, and all-important security updates that come as quickly as possible.

Practically, Google’s purchase of the HTC doesn’t mean a whole lot in the short term. Those folks have been working on Google hardware exclusively for years. But it does mean that the Pixel is likely here to stay as just one of the many arms of Google’s growing hardware Kraken.