Revealed in February 2014, the idea was that you can swap out different parts of a phone, in favor of ones that fit your needs.
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Google has suspended the modular smartphone development programme Project Ara as part of a broader effort to streamline its mobile business. The news is surprising, to say the least.
In May, Google promised to launch a developer edition of its Project Ara modular smartphone by the end of the year and take a consumer version to the market in 2017.
While Google will not be releasing the phone itself, the company may work with partners to bring Project Ara’s technology to market, potentially through licensing agreements, one of the people with knowledge of the matter said.
That’s according to fresh reports about a unification of the company’s hardware efforts, with the potential for third-party partners to, instead, brings something akin to Project Ara to market.
Google’s Project Ara, formerly a Motorola ATAP project, is reportedly being shut down after its launch was delayed a year ago.
Google is now in the midst of a process to unify its numerous hardware efforts from Nexus handsets to Chromebooks. The first device to come out of the program was meant to launch in Puerto Rico a year ago, but the company scrapped that pilot.
Google has given up on its dreams of building its own modular smartphone. The project was taken care of by the Advanced Technology and Projects group that Google made a decision to hold onto even after its divestiture of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo in 2014. Most components were created to be swappable, allowing users to easily add and remove options such as additional batteries, cameras, speakers, and change other features as they wanted and needed. However, the first generation model would not allow customers to change core components like screen, processor and battery as it was included in the frame of the device.
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“No easy task but Google certainly seem the best placed to try, and their underlying premise of Ara is the creation of an open Android smartphone hardware platform”.
