Google Ara May Not See The Light Of Day
One of the most ambitious project of the tech world might never see the light of the day.
Most smartphones in the market are pretty similar. Don’t get me wrong, there is a huge amount of variety, but by and large they all do the same thing, and look similar, if not pretty much the same.
Disappointingly, a cool-seeming rebel to this trend, Google’s Ara, has now turned into more of a ‘could have been’, with Reuters officially announcing the death of the project earlier this month.
It was a little surprising to hear, especially given that at the annual I/O Conference this May, Google indulged in Ara hype, again, after almost a year of radio silence on the topic. They announced partnerships forged, and even made a lot of noise about how thirty people within the Google team were using Ara as a primary device.
Google’s project Ara was modular smartphone project. The world (including us) was super-excited. In fact we even wrote two in-depth editorials about the project — you could read them here and here.
The project was intended to produce a phone that could be customized to an absolute form; all common hardware components of a smartphone, processors, displays, batteries, and cameras, could be put together on a frame, and you could move things around as you pleased.
For the lack of a better description, I would compare it to a Lego toy, where you can move around components as you please.
The phone and the vision behind it were something different altogether.
In a market where most smart hardware looks and feels almost the same, this would have been a creative standout, especially for those looking for an alternative to the planned obsolescence of today’s handsets.
The phone was appealing even from the point of view of the build. Official images featured components lying on the table, demanding to be played with. They seemed adaptable, sturdy, and by the contemporary standard like they were built to last.
The project seemed to be going along well — prototypes were unveiled, the launch dates were speculated for the coming year; for a while, it seemed like Google had actually succeeded. Then the storms started circling.
Initially, it what was expected to be a 2015 launch had already gotten dragged to the last quarter of 2016, and the device was nowhere near ready for a launch in the coming six months either. The top gun at ATAP, Regina Dugan, left Google for Facebook and a promise of ‘hundreds of people, and hundreds of millions of dollars’ not too long before the I/O Conference in May. “Each of our efforts to create new, seemingly impossible products, has been faced with intense challenges along the way. Technical challenges. Organizational challenges. Challenges that might have broken lesser teams”, she wrote in a blog post, addressing her former colleagues inside ATAP, just before leaving. “This is the type of work we signed up for when we built ATAP. It is terrifying because it means we have to face our fear of failure, stare it down, more days than most. So be it”.
If one were to look at Dugan’s move under a microscope, it wouldn’t take too long to reach the conclusion that Google has grown big, struggling to maintain its innovative edge as it morphs into a giant corporation. Facebook seems nimble enough to foster an environment where this kind of thing has a better chance of succeeding.
Coming back to the fate of Ara, delays further ensued, and then the axe finally fell. Everyone who had until this point been rooting for Ara in their hearts felt a pinch; we all knew after all that it was a dream too big.
What was the bigger reason behind the project getting the axe, though? The answers can only be speculations.
The project was indeed an expensive one, as one would imagine, producing a phone like Ara would be. The cost of the entire project, however, is unlikely to be the reason, since companies already keep into account the “expensiveness of innovation and development”.
So, if that is the case, one would have to attribute the axe to the cost of the production of the individual unit, as it got too costly to make any sense for the market.
Another reason could have been the brutal pace of development that smartphone manufacturers maintain.
Most companies release more than 3 to 4 flagships a year aimed at different buyer profiles, and upgraded versions of the same model line every year. In such a fast paced tech world, a phone is out on the market one Quarter, and before you know it, there is another that is seemingly a better version of the same in the next Quarter.
For a project like Ara, which has been on for at least three years, keeping up with that kind of pace in the market would become next to impossible.
The Advanced Technology and Project team under Motorola Mobility initially led the project, while Google owned it. When Motorola Mobility got sold to Lenovo, Google retained the ATAP team, under the stewardship of the Android division.
Word has it that by now Google Ara has spun into a full-blown operation by itself, and warranted its own team entirely. With the project now dead, one can assume that the team members were absorbed into other ongoing projects at the development division of the company.
It is not the first time that the idea of a modular phone has come into existence. An example to come to mind would be of Motorola Z Play. It is a phone where a lot of the modules can be snapped on. But these are high-end add-ons, like a Hasselblad camera, and not the core hardware of the phone, as it would have been with the Ara.
Officially the project is stated as ‘suspended’, meaning that the current team has terminated it. But as it works in the tech world, someone with real passion out there might still reopen it one day, and maybe bring it to life.
“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”, said an unnamed source within the company and has since been quoted by multiple news forums.
I’m going to go drown my sorrows by playing some Candy Crush now, and completely drain my phone’s non-removable battery. Just because.
Originally published at Chip-Monks.
