Roughly a decade ago, Google pulled the plug on its alluring modular “Project Ara” smartphone. All this time later, though, prototypes are still out there, with some new videos offering another look at the device.
The idea behind Project Ara was to offer a modular smartphone with components that could be swapped out with relative ease. Want a different camera? Just trade out the module. Bigger battery? Add another one. And so on. It was a very fun and pretty compelling idea, but it just never came to fruition. Google was beta testing the device as far back as 2014, but ended up delaying the device at one point. When further plans were later announced, it wasn’t much longer before Google shelved the project entirely. Prototypes have surfaced in the past, but it’s been a while since we’ve seen anything about Ara.
Top comment by Arthur
I was really bummed when this concept never made it to reality and the ARA team was basically shutdown.
At the time, the team behind Project ARA was brought over to Google when Google acquired Motorola and the team consisted of some high profile members specifically the main creator Paul Eremenko and Regina Dugan, both of whom were ex-DARPA employees so the project at the time felt very hopeful that we could see it actually happen.
Sadly I think the logistics of making the individual components work, cost associated, getting third party hardware vendors to come onboard to make the modules, like previous modular phone efforts from others, it's a very hard concept to pull off.
LG tried a quasi modular phone themselves with the G5 and the "Friends" line which was a very limited take on a modular phone and that idea never really went further than the G5.
I think Motorola's take with Moto Mods may have been the most successful but they do dropped it even though they gave it a good go of it but that too didn't catch on too much with third party hardware vendors.
Recently, though, some videos popped up to show off prototype units of Google’s Project Ara.
A user who goes by “Racoondetectionsquad” on TikTok somehow ended up with not just one but three Project Ara units and a number of modules and, in some pictures and videos, shows off the device and its modules in different configurations. One video also shows the process of removing a module using a SIM card ejector tool rather than the software options. Two different types of cameras modules were shown alongside a speaker module and what appears to be a pair of battery modules. One of the modules also has a switch of some kind. These extra modules are the main things different from a prior leaked prototype from 2016.
The very idea of Project Ara is something that really wouldn’t work in the modern smartphone era – both for practical reasons, and because it’s the opposite of how companies treat smartphones nowadays – but it’s still fun to look back at what could’ve been.
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