A year ago, the Google-owned Motorola Mobility company opened a smartphone production factory in Texas to much press coverage and acclaim. The big story behind the factory was that it would be the first smartphone assembly plant on United States soil, and would therefore be a major boon to the nationwide economy. Despite the near-ubiquitous use of smartphone devices in the U.S., virtually all production for such devices remains outsourced to foreign economies.

The Motorola factory was supposed to be a paradigm shifter, showing that not only could devices be manufactured in the U.S., but that domestic manufacturing would also have huge advantages for consumers. Google initially wanted to build customized phones to order, believing that the Texas location of the Motorola plant would allow for quick turnaround time and easy delivery. In fact, the company was at one time promising custom phone design, assembly, and delivery in just five days.

Still, even the promise of quick, convenient, and affordable custom phone designs could not give Motorola Mobility the firepower it needed to compete with the brand recognition of phones like the Samsung Galaxy or the iPhone. Now, according to ABC News, Google is shutting down operations at the Texas-based Motorola plant, seemingly bringing the brief era of American smartphone manufacturing to an end.

Google says that the sales of Motorola devices – including the company’s flagship smartphone, the Moto X – were not high enough to justify the cost of keeping the assembly plant up and running. Motorola will still continue to manufacture and assemble smartphones, of course, but will now do it from Asia because the costs of labor are cheaper. In other words, Motorola will now build its smartphones in the same place that virtually every other mobile company on the planet already does.

Google itself is ready to leave Motorola Mobility behind. The search engine company recently sold Motorola’s smartphone division to the China-based computer company Lenovo for $2.9 billion, meaning that all operations for the division will now be run from Asia anyway.