Building blocks: how Project Ara is reinventing the smartphone
A handful of Google engineers and designers are building a phone the DARPA way — In a spare, drab office park in Sunnyvale, California, a bunch of two-by-fours and foamboard have been nailed together into a makeshift model of a shipping container.
Context & Ripple Effects
TIME's February 2014 profile introduced Project Ara as Google's bet on a modular smartphone; The Verge's new feature goes deeper into how the small Sunnyvale team actually works, borrowing DARPA-style rapid prototyping — foamboard models and fast iteration — rather than a traditional handset program.
The pickup is unusually broad for a pre-launch hardware story: CNET, Wired, the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Engadget, The Next Web, LAPTOP Magazine and 9to5Google all carried versions within a day, with CNET reporting a January 2015 target date. That spread signals the industry sees Ara as a structural question about the smartphone, not a Google side project.
First-order effects
- Google's Ara team shifts from concept to supply chain: hitting a January 2015 target means recruiting module makers to build components against Google's endoskeleton specification, effectively creating a hardware ecosystem before a product exists.
- Android OEMs such as Samsung face a rival model in their own back yard — a phone whose camera, battery and processor are user-swappable, attacking the annual whole-device upgrade cycle.
Second-order effects
- Carriers, who alongside Apple, Microsoft and Samsung just signed the April 2014 voluntary anti-theft commitment, would see their grip on the device lifecycle loosen if users replace individual modules instead of subsidized handsets on two-year contracts.
- Module developers gain a distribution channel analogous to the Play Store for physical parts, pulling component suppliers toward whoever sets the connector and size standards.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the handset industry splits between integrated-device makers and platform owners: Google would control the phone's physical standard the way Android controls its software layer, with third parties competing on swappable modules.
The trend: Smartphones are edging from sealed, annually replaced devices toward modular platforms, with Google's Ara testing whether a hardware ecosystem can work the way Android's software one does.