Ara is no longer a fully upgradeable smart phone, but it’s still one of the coolest concepts to come out of the industry in recent years. As its founder Dave Hakkens explains:
“It basically means the Ara skeleton is a fully equipped phone with things like CPU, antennas, sensors, battery and display. The 6 little blocky modules on the back of the phone are just add-ons like better camera’s, speakers, scanners etc. Things to customise your phone, for fun.
It means your phone still gets obsolete after a while. What if your screen breaks? Well you still need to replace the entire phone. And after a couple of years it gets slow and you need to replace your entire skeleton.
A system like this makes other companies want to compete instead of collaborate. They will build their own modular phone, want to create their own ecosystem with their own sizes and connectors. Making modules not compatible with each other anymore. Which ends up in a lot of different modules. Developers will need to make their hardware work on different platforms. If Google truly wants to make a phone for the entire world, they should collaborate with others and make an open standard owned by the industry. Not one company.”
From Forbes:
This is the unfortunate reality of Ara. It’s an extension to what LG has done with its G5. It’s modular in part, in definition, but not in spirit. As I understood it, one of the core goals of the Ara project was to create a device that acts as a shell from which you create the device you need.