
HMD plans to stop selling phones in the US, and you probably know why
TL;DR HMD Global has revealed that it is scaling back its operations in the US.
The company cites the 'challenging geopolitical and economic environment' as the reason for the decision.
It will continue to honor warranty coverage and service for existing products.
If you're an HMD Global, the Android phone maker that licenses the Nokia brand, fan who lives in the US, we have some bad news for you. The company has decided to stop selling its phones in the US. And you can probably guess the reason why.
Over on Threads, Wired writer Julian Chokkattu shared a statement sent to him by HMD Global. The statement reveals that the company intends to wind down its operations in the US. As for why it's making the decision to exit the US market, HMD cites the 'challenging geopolitical and economic environment.' This relates to the tariff situation in the US, which is raising costs for both companies and consumers.
Although HMD is scaling back its operations in the US, it says it will continue to honor all of its obligations. So those in the US who own an HMD phone will still have their warranty coverage and can receive service for existing products. The company adds that support for US customers will go through its global teams.
Got a tip? Talk to us! Email our staff at
Email our staff at news@androidauthority.com . You can stay anonymous or get credit for the info, it's your choice.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Forbes
11 minutes ago
- Forbes
No Friends In The Pipeline: Why 300,000 Black Women Were Pushed Out Of The Workforce
A recently published MSNBC article made headlines for a shocking stat: nearly 300,000 Black women have exited the American labor force in the last three months. The article attributes the mass exodus to reasons like federal job cuts and the dismantling of DEI programs, with issues like inflation, student loan debt, automation, and underrepresentation in growing tech sectors creating a compounded economic risk for Black women. This phenomenon not only hurts Black women but has a ripple effect for the entire U.S. economy, resulting in a loss in the country's gross domestic product (GDP). A less-discussed issue that must be considered is how what is happening is also the cause of a widening network gap faced by Black women. A 2019 article from LinkedIn's Vice President of Social Impact, Meg Garlinghouse, explored the network gap: the unequal access a person has to opportunities based on who they know. Garlinghouse's article cited research that indicates that 70% of professionals get hired at jobs where they know someone who works there. A 2020 study by Chika O. Okafor indicated that non-white job candidates get fewer jobs through referrals because their social network is smaller. With the anti-DEI legislation and a wave of corporate DEI rollbacks, many companies have deprioritized DEI, dismantling programs and initiatives like employee resource groups (ERGs), which provide key opportunities to boost one's professional network. According to Catalyst, ERGs can be thought of as 'voluntary, employee-led groups that foster inclusive work environments aligned with business values, goals, and objectives.' Often ERGs focus on a shared identity (race, religion, being a parent, LGBTQIA+ status, etc.). ERGs provide employees with pathways to network, connect across departments, find mentors, and build relationships but many organizations are quietly shuttering their ERGs amid growing anti-DEI sentiments. Having less opportunities to be in community with employees at different levels in an organization can exacerbate the network gap that Black women face. Mentorship and sponsorship programs, which are often perceived to be DEI or DEI-adjacent, may be halted in the current climate, even though these programs can play an instrumental role in employees' careers, and Black women's career advancement. A wealth of research indicates that Black women leading Fortune 500 companies, as well as those in education, medicine, and tech, routinely report feelings of both hypervisibility and invisibility. Organizational psychologist Dr. Kecia M. Thomas has highlighted the pet to threat concept in her research: the phenomenon in Black women's career trajectories where they go from being the 'pet,' where they are well-liked and celebrated but exploited, to being the 'threat,' where they are seen as posing a risk to the status quo. A 2023 report from Exhale indicated that 36% of Black women have exited a job because they felt unsafe. Black women face a slew of inequities in the workplace and must deal with issues of gendered racism and the angry Black woman stereotype. A 2024 Harvard study also found evidence that when Black women have a higher percentage of white team members, they are more likely to leave their job and less likely to be promoted, revealing the systemic inequities that are entrenched in the workplace. The rise of AI may be making the problem worse. Many of the AI tools that companies lean on to help with hiring decisions may exacerbate existing biases, contributing to hiring gaps when it comes to Black women. Black women are overrepresented in jobs roles that are vulnerable to AI and automation, explained executive leadership coach Margaret Spence in a LinkedIn article. These factors in conjunction with the dismantling of corporate DEI programs makes building and sustaining professional networks for Black women more challenging. What can organizations do to address this issue? First off, workplaces should be intentional about providing employees with opportunities to network with each other. Do you have active mentorship and sponsorship programs in place? If not, how can you get them started? Ensure that equity is foundational in your workplace; frequently audit company policies and practices to ensure fairness and disaggregate employee feedback from anonymous channels, focus groups, and surveys to better understand Black women's experiences. What are Black women saying when they leave your organization? Assess exit interview data to see if patterns are emerging from the Black women who have left. The current anti-DEI legislation was implemented to sow fear and confusion in the workplace. Be aware of the ever-changing laws and stay up to date on local legislation. Consult with legal counsel to better understand what DEI practices are legal. Despite popular misconceptions, there are still many ways to drive fairness and equity while complying with state and federal laws. For Black women, there are some ways to address the network gap. Building community intentionally is vital. Consider joining different community groups, whether in-person or virtually, that align with your goals. This could be an online community for Black women in law, for example, or a meetup group for Black women in cybersecurity. If the community you are seeking doesn't exist, think about ways to create it. Also consider intentional networking on LinkedIn. Many see the platform as a place to go only when job searching but it can also be a great place to build networks, find your people and directly engage with community members. Black women's mass exodus from the U.S. labor market is caused by several different factors. While some reasons, like the DEI rollbacks and federal job cuts, are more obvious, there are issues that are more insidious at play. It's important that we understand what the antecedents are and put measures in place to ensure that Black women are given the support that is needed to thrive. When Black women are given the tools to succeed, everyone across the board will benefit.


Bloomberg
11 minutes ago
- Bloomberg
UBS Settles Credit Suisse Mortgage-Bond Case for $300 Million
UBS Group AG said it has reached an agreement with the US Department of Justice to resolve a legacy Credit Suisse matter related to the former bank's role in selling residential mortgage-backed securities in the US. 'On 1 August 2025, Credit Suisse Securities (USA) LLC entered into an agreement with the DOJ to resolve all of Credit Suisse's outstanding Consumer Relief Obligations under the 2017 settlement by paying $300 million,' the bank said in a statement on Monday.
Yahoo
14 minutes ago
- Yahoo
The New York Times thinks generative AI is like Pac-Man ghosts and also the Matrix, because nobody gets to be normal about this stuff anymore
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The New York Times is being hazed by game dev social media over what I can only describe as one of the most naive articles about AI I've ever seen. The pointing and laughing is happening on BlueSky, among other places, over a paragraph that claims generative AI is being embraced by the videogame industry, which sure, makes sense, because we were giving those funny Pac-Man ghosts AIs in the past. And isn't that the same thing? No. No it's not—though being wary of simply taking a lone paragraph out of context, I went ahead and read the full thing. It does not get much better. Get out your bingo cards. The piece immerses us into a nice balmy pot of misunderstanding soup with the sentence "It sounds like a thought experiment conjured by René Descartes for the 21st century." Hoo boy. Its writer, Zachary Small, then goes on to reference this video that went viral a couple of years ago, wherein a YouTuber gets proportionately freaked out as generative AI NPCs start getting a bit existential in a tech demo by Replica. I'd link to Replica's website, but the company doesn't exist anymore which, to be fair, the article does acknowledge several paragraphs down. The NYT frames this as some kind of brush with the machine god: "Everything was fake, a player told them through a microphone, and they were simply lines of code meant to embellish a virtual world. Empowered by generative artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, the characters responded in panicked disbelief. 'What does that mean,' said one woman in a gray sweater. 'Am I real or not?'" This sort of open-mouthed astonishment might've been apropos three years ago, when all of this tech was still relatively new, but AI doesn't actually think or understand anything. It didn't then, and it doesn't now. Here's a solid breakdown by MIT from the time period, which explains: "In this huge corpus of text, words and sentences appear in sequences with certain dependencies. This recurrence helps the model understand how to cut text into statistical chunks that have some predictability. It learns the patterns of these blocks of text and uses this knowledge to propose what might come next." In other words, what we might call an 'educated guess'. Replica's AI was trained on text written by people, and people have written about machines becoming self-aware before, which is why the NPCs spat out lines about being self-aware when they were told they were machines. This is like saying Google is sapient because it fed me a link to Isaac Asimov's I, Robot when I searched for it: A program taking educated guesses does not a singularity make. To be clear, generative AI has been having a major impact on videogames—both in the fact that there are legitimate use-cases being found, and in the fact that excitable CEOs are getting ahead of themselves and mandating employees use it, which is totally a normal thing you do with a technology you're naturally finding use cases for. The paragraph that active developers are dunking on, however, is this doozy: "Most experts acknowledge that a takeover by artificial intelligence is coming for the video game industry within the next five years, and executives have already started preparing to restructure their companies in anticipation. After all, it was one of the first sectors to deploy AI programming in the 1980s, with the four ghosts who chase Pac-Man each responding differently to the player's real-time movements." I'm just gonna rattle off the problems with this statement one-by-one. First up, which experts? Sure, Nvidia's CEO says AI is coming for everybody's jobs, but also, it's sort of his job to sell AI technology. You know who else said we'd all have to adapt to AI? Netflix's former VP of GenAI for Games, who stopped working there four months later. CEO of Larian Studios Swen Vincke (note: someone who actually makes games) isn't nearly as convinced—while the developer does use generative AI for the early, early stages of prototyping, basically anything thereafter is made by hand. CD Projekt is also steering clear, because the quagmire of legal ownership just isn't worth it. Some executives have done some restructuring that may or may not be related to AI—I certainly don't doubt that AI plays a part, but widespread layoffs and studio closures are also down to, say, buying a company for $68 billion, or flubbing a $2 billion investment deal. You know. CEO things. And then there's the coup de grâce on this lump of coal—the comparison to the ghosts in Pac-Man, as if that has anything to do with anything. No, the programming of Pac-Man's ghosts has nothing to do with generative AI or deep learning models, a completely different technology. Tōru Iwatani, a person, gave them their distinct 'personalities'. "We're gonna be making our games differently, but to say that it'll replace the craftsmanship? I think we're very far from it." Larian CEO Swen Vincke (GameSpot interview, April 2025) To be clear, this is about as relevant as saying the videogame industry's adopting AI because Crazy Taxi had a pointing arrow in it that leads to your next objective—it's a loose association by someone who saw the word "AI" twice and assumed those things must be related. I could continue ribbing on this thing. For example, there's a one-two punch where Small references fretting over gen AI npcs "dying" when a game gets shut down as developers "forgoing those moral questions in their presentations to studio executives," then proceeds to talk about how Sony made an AI Aloy without also noting that the character's voice actor, Ashley Burch, found the whole thing repulsive. It also happens to suggest that using "AI programs to complete repetitive tasks like placing barrels throughout a virtual village" is novel, when procedural generations have existed for years (and in fact might be a more apt comparison, if we're going to draw a line from point A to point B). But I think what's really telling is how noncommittal the answers Small receives are. Microsoft's response was the most gung-ho, though it still clarified that "Game creators will always be the center of our overall AI efforts". Nintendo pointed Small in the direction of its prior statements, wherein the company said "would rather go in a different direction". Even the experts at companies Small quotes are downright tepid, often pointing towards cost and realistic expectations for the things he says are just five years around the corner. Look—generative AI's gonna have, and already has had, an impact on game development, and will be used inside of it. But I would implore both the writers at the NYT, and just about anyone else, to apply a little bit of skepticism before you believe claims that these models are forming relationships, inventing art styles, or becoming self-aware. That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works.