Google once owned a phone maker. It didn’t work out. Now it’s trying a different approach.

The technology giant agreed to pay $1.1 billion to hire smartphone engineers from the struggling Taiwanese manufacturer HTC.

Why? To double down on producing its own hardware. Google has been especially focused on its Pixel line of premium smartphones, some of which are made by HTC and have gotten good reviews.

From The New York Times’s Daisuke Wakabayashi:

Apple has followed a similar strategy for years, and that has provided the iPhone maker with an easier path when adding new features, such as augmented reality functions, since it designs nearly all of the internal parts of its phone.

Here’s the take of Ars Technica’s Ron Amadeo, one of the top smartphone reviewers around:

A beefier hardware team should also help Google bring much more of the design in-house. It should also help it realize some of its bigger smartphone hardware ambitions, which include things like making its own SoCs and building machine learning coprocessors.

The Deal Makers

• On Google’s side: Lazard and the law firms Cleary Gottlieb and Lee & Li

• On HTC’s team: Evercore and the law firms Gibson Dunn and Tsar & Tsai

Flashback

Google was in hardware once before: It paid $12.5 billion for Motorola Mobility in 2010. It sold that business to Lenovo for just $2.9 billion three years later.