Slashdot Mirror
Google Cancels Project Ara Modular Smartphone Plans, Says Report (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Google has "suspended" work on Project Ara, the initiative to build a phone with interchangeable modules for various components like cameras and batteries, according to Reuters and Recode. The company reportedly may license the technology to other partners, but will not release a phone itself. The decision is said to be part of an effort to unify Google's hardware development under former Motorola president Rick Osterloh. Although Project Ara has always seemed a dubious commercial prospect, the news is surprising if only because Google made a renewed effort to push the modular concept at its I/O conference earlier this year, promising a developer version for fall and a consumer release for 2017. Google's Project Ara was originally spearheaded by Motorola to reinvent the smartphone in a form made up of hot-swappable modules that consumers can configure as they choose, then upgrade later as new technologies emerge. RIP Project Ara.
anyone see google NOT becoming exactly like ms over the next few years?
After years of spending money like drunken sailors, the bean counters have commandeered the Google Lollipop and unprofitable projects are walking the plank..
Seems that the later is never going to be popular for smartphones
Am I the only one whos not surprised by this? It always seemed like an R+D exercise to me. I never expected it to see the light of day!
Management is going awry at google, creating several projects than canning them all, getting products that people used, liked or even loved with a passion like Reader and Talk and just getting rid of it. Make moves to unify everything just to separate a few months after, make great hardware and just neglect it or change in a direction that consumers don't want (no vanilla Nexus, really google, really??)
Something is rotten at google, I think there is a lot of back stabbing and rug pulling that we are not seeing that is affecting the final products.
I'm really afraid that any day now they will touch Gmail and Search and will start a down spiral so steep that the crash will be inevitable.
I wanted one of those, it's a damn shame they messed it up.
Google canceling a project? Say it aint so.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
It looked great on a white board and had a bunch of nerds fanta-fapping about it but it was never going to be practical.
Management is going awry at google, creating several projects than canning them all, getting products that people used, liked or even loved with a passion like Reader and Talk and just getting rid of it.
It's all about return on investment. Never forget that almost all of Alphabet's (aka Google's) revenue comes from advertising. Anything that doesn't ultimately generate more advertising profits is very likely to get the ax at some point. Search, Gmail, Youtube, etc are quite safe. I'm not remotely surprised that some of those other projects were killed off and/or neglected. Interesting ideas but not necessarily good businesses within Google. Google isn't a charity so it should shock no one when they get out of lines of business that they regard as dead ends.
Anything that involves actually making and distributing physical products is probably not going to be something Google pursues hard themselves. They aren't a manufacturing or consumer electronics company in their DNA. Not to say they couldn't become one with a lot of effort but you'd see it coming a mile away. The ONLY reason Google got into making Android was to keep themselves from being shut out of the advertising business by other mobile phone makers (Apple, Blackberry, Microsoft, etc). They don't make money from Android itself but they do make money by advertising through android devices. Google isn't a hardware company and it doesn't shock me at all that they have a hard time keeping their eye on the ball when they do make hardware for retail markets. Doing that well requires structuring the company to support it and Google clearly isn't interested.
I'm really afraid that any day now they will touch Gmail and Search and will start a down spiral so steep that the crash will be inevitable.
Since those are basically among their main drivers of advertising income I think your fears are misplaced. I really cannot imagine Google getting out of the search business.
The entire project has always been stupid. People aren't interested in upgrading hardware of their phone around a standard frame. People are interested in upgrading the shiny factor, the new screen with the curved edge, the shiny yellow golden sides, the curved displays.
This project was a stillbirth from the moment of conception.
Meanwhile the Fairphone is a modular android phone, with end user replaceable parts that exists today.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
I'm really disappointed in this decision.
But, I think we all saw it coming.
*smh*
I'm really disappointed with this decision. So much potential wasted.
But, I think we all saw this coming a mile away. It didn't come across as 'sexy' enough.
Too bad...
*smh*
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
https://davehakkens.nl/news/re...
dave hakkens is the person who really inspired the modular smartphone movement and brought it to prominence (buglabs was the first to really implement the concept, almost a decade ago). however we don't really have an actual explanation of what went wrong with project ara. here's some hints (search in this document for "ara" obviously): http://rhombus-tech.net/whitep...
basically it's down to the fact that google has more money than they have creative sense. they therefore tried to use "financial brute force" to solve problems. the summary is: with their financial resources they created a "backbone standard" called MIPI UniPro... forgetting that in the process it would be patented by the partners, thus AUTOMATICALLY locking out ANY kind of interoperability and competition for the next 20 years. how, exactly, is that supposed to be "open"???
if we want modular smartphones to be successful, we need PROPERLY OPEN STANDARDs that have no vendor lock-in, but that are also properly protected by a Certification Mark (the standards-equivalent of a Trademark) and a Foundation (or CIC or Benefit Corporation), which is given the financial clout by its sponsors to jump on anyone who wrongly implements the standard in such a way as to cause short-circuits (and end up killing someone due to lithium battery fires for example). it's not like a software standard, where interoperability failures cause a segfault: a HARDWARE fault can genuinely be dangerous.
also the standard needs to be made up of *other* standards that are unencumbered and royalty-free, so that companies and makers alike are incentivised to create modules (using 3D printers and low-cost off-the-shelf circuits), for example this one, under development: http://elinux.org/Embedded_Ope... . Google *literally* did the total opposite of this strategy in every single conceivable way. paying companies to develop new chipsets (patented, proprietary) and saying "here! it's open! sign our NDA, agree to our policy, and you'll be fiiiine!" i'm just staggered by the naivety of a billion-dollar company that had to add me to a special list "stop phoning this person to invite them to interview, you've called them five times already over the past 10 years".
the other thing is, whilst i am delighted at dave's success in bringing the benefits of modularity to a wider audience, he doesn't have any technical knowledge. he views an *increase* in the number of companies on the phonebloks.com front page as being a good thing. the key question which illustrates the point without having to spell it out: are any of the products listed on the phonebloks page interoperable in *any* way?
so. if there is anybody who would like to see this done properly - in an open fashion so that the mistakes of both google and fairphone are not repeated (see http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/...) do reach out on the arm-netbook mailing list http://lists.phcomp.co.uk/mail... i've been investigating and researching this for years and waiting for the right opportunity. often it's good to wait for "big" corporations to fail to deliver, because it means that the hugely-public lessons sink in. a "small person" saying "this ain't gonna work no matter how much money they throw at it" tends not to be believed until the predicted failure comes about.
just as i did with the successfully-crowd-funded modular libre eco-laptop i've set up a stub page (for now) http://rhombus-tech.net/commun... which is a hybrid phone that acts "dumb" and may be upgraded to "smart" by plugging in a computer-on-a-module in Compact-Flash form-factor. "peripher
I told ya this would never see the light of day. Toldja toldja toldja.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
What few people realize is that Apple has not based profits around yearly upgrades, but is perfectly fine with a two or three year upgrade cycle... they build the hardware to last at least that long, if not longer... My wife usually keeps her iPhone for about three years before upgrading, and is still using an iPad 2 from 2011 which works great.
Most other phone makers have hardware which is not nearly as durable and doesn't get updates through a 2-3 year cycle, so it has to be replaced a lot sooner.
The modular approach to having a phone upgrade was always flawed because it would have had the same fundamental problem with software updates over time.. it's nice that you could upgrade hardware, but the core software that controls everything really matters far more at this point.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seriously, I thought the Moto Z was the fruit of the Google Project, what with Moto Mobile being a Google property until recently. It's not? Oh, well, modular smartphones are here if the market wants them.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
It's time we started diagnosing corporations with mental disorders. Google has clearly been suffering a serious case of ADHD. Can we get them on adderall pronto?
This space intentionally left blank
Reminds me of that old Dirty Harry line:
"A man has to know his limitations"
A product or service intentionally designed to be abandoned on a whim. Caveat don't bother.
I was surprised from the beginning Google would spend any time on modular phones. Love the idea but having a company like Google work on it went against my world view of what Google is.
More generally given the increasing failure of the market to be driven by consumers rather than advertisers and stalkers the cesspool of evil overall industry is becoming would seem to preclude practical expectation of anything useful.
Modular phones are a gateway to sanity. Operating systems and hardware would necessarily have to be more like PC ending this insane crap of cooking specific roms for each and every device and providing more choice and diversity. With that the whole house of cards begins to collapse.
Carriers and manufacturers have less ability to load their malwares or impose planned obsolesce by refusing to maintain software. Consumers get more choices and more options from more providers who can now afford to produce and specialize in specific modules rather than needing to build out entire devices. Modules could be updated or replaced by users without having to throw the whole device in the trash.
Every single one of these things translates into current players losing out so why would they do it? How would they benefit? In my view the answer is clear they can't so they won't.
"...bespoke phone ... product for a market of 100s of thousands of units in a particular configuration"
Huh?
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
I don't know about that, but Microsoft sure is becoming a lot more like Google. They've been open sourcing stuff, they've made a major move away from selling software to a services and SaaS model, etc.
This was a idea and project that other than research benefits was doomed to failure.
most people DON'T upgrade their computers
even more people DON'T upgrade their laptops
almost NO ONE would upgrade or even want to upgrade their phone.
The "cost" of modularization exponentially increases with each step above. people don't want the extra cost on a computer or laptop, why a phone?
Most laptops aren't even modular now. Why? no one buys the modules outside of some niche areas.
On today's phones most people don't prioritize removable batteries or or expandable storage. yet people were going to switch out modules? ROFL
From an ROI pov, it was foolish to cut this project. Right now, south Korean companies are working on tizen, while Chinese, as well as Russian, gov are working on on clones. Then you have Europe pushing for something else as well. In each case, those regions have control of the hardware, which means that Google can not control this. However, if Google does ara, it creates an incredible competition at daughterboard level, rather than at phone. In addition, it allows for new players to jump in easily and have consumers make choices, not telephone providers.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Bespoke design: somebody sketched out exactly what features the phone should have and the phone was designed to accommodate those, and only those features. Although bespoke usually gets applied to custom projects for one-off customers, it can also be applied to any design "made to order" - even if the production quantities are in the millions.
Contrasting with an "a la carte" or modular design where you can get your product with any combination of a number of options: the Burger King "have it your way" method - 531,441 possible ways to make a whopper, most of them unpalatable.