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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.
After years of spending money like drunken sailors, the bean counters have commandeered the Google Lollipop and unprofitable projects are walking the plank..
Oh no! A project was cancelled! Surely it's not because it wasn't viable and only because the company is evil!
I want a thick, small-screen phone.
Why can't I buy one ? Capitalism is failing me.
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.
ah NO. please do some research BEFORE recommending fairphone to people. you'll notice that Fairphone has REMOVED (reneged on) their promise to provide a "Fair OS". their naivety (and the fact that they haven't listened to extremely experienced software libre developers) is well-documented - a good example is here: http://blogs.fsfe.org/pboddie/...
the Fairphone is only "modular" if you are mechanically-minded. i know of people who are competent engineers who, in attempting to repair a laptop, have managed accidentally to destroy FPC12 connectors because they weren't anticipating quite how tiny and fragile they would be.
"Modularity" also doesn't really solve the problem of chipsets being proprietary *and* insecure - google "900 million qualcomm android security vulnerability". you have to actually *design* the phone in *advance* to take into account these sorts of things. Neither google nor Fairphone have done that.
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
But this is Google canceling a project! Google, the company famed for following though on all ideas to their natural conclusion, which never quits on a project, who we all rely on for their steadfast determination to never change course or abandon anything.
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Here you go. It's in there somewhere. Good luck.