may soon see a true phone. 

Yes, there’s the Nexus line, which are phones that sells in close partnership with a rotating cast of hardware makers. But according to a Telegraph report, is going to build its own smartphone from scratch, just as it’s done with the xel Chromebooks tablet. 

The thinking is that this would allow to more directly compete with Apple for the high end of the smartphone market, which is still dominated by the ione in many stern markets. The Telegraph claims that “a senior source” tells it to expect the phone by the end of the year.

But there’s some evidence is moving in this direction. The company was recently rumored to be seeking partners to build its own chips, which would greatly ease the process of piecing together the other necessary components for a new phone. also hired former Motorola esident Osterloh to lead a new hardware division, giving the company someone with plenty of experience overseeing the process.

So the pieces are there, but it’s a matter of when. It’s highly likely that HTC is building two Nexus phones this year, so announcing another phone so soon would surely generate some phone fatigue. Instead, this behind-the-scenes work could be part of a longer effort that might materialize next year, possibly alongside the oject Ara modular smartphone. It’s a rumor worth monitoring, even though we won’t likely see any new hardware in the short term.

Of course, we’ve heard this before it’s never come to pass. It could be that these sources are confusing ‘s more involved Nexus efforts with building marketing its own phone from scratch.

y this matters: ile Android dominates the worldwide smartphone market, the platform’s fragmentation revenue gap with the App Store have always been challenges for . One way to fix that is to go into the hardware business so controls everything: hardware, software, updates. Such a move likely wouldn’t sit well with hardware partners, though Dell, novo, others in the space have found a way to get by even with direct competition from Microsoft’s Surface line.