10 years later, no phone has replaced what Google promised

Google’s Project Ara boldly tried to bring the customization and interoperability of PC assembling to our smartphones. The idea of upgrading only the parts of your smartphone that were outdated felt like a tech utopia. You’d never need to switch your entire phone, but instead turn it into a ship of Theseus of sorts with each upgrade.

However, if you look at the smartphone market now, some ten years since Project Ara was conceived, you’ll see that we’ve gone in the opposite direction. Smartphone makers are doing all they can to make even repairability difficult, let alone giving you modular upgrade options.

Each time I’m forced to upgrade my phone, I’m pulled back to the idea of Project Ara. My brain knows it will remain a dream, but my heart still wants it to become a reality — even 10 years later.

What Ara could’ve been

If Project Ara had sustained its early vision and made it to 2026, I’m sure it would’ve looked very different from what it did back then. For starters, we’d know every single year who’s going to win MKBHD’s most repairable phone of the year award. But it would’ve had a much more sweeping effect on the industry.

The tech industry is scrambling to hit environmental and sustainability goals with recycled materials. Project Ara could’ve been the product other brands followed, simply because upgrades would’ve been more meaningful, intentional, and hyper-localized — saving tons in unnecessary tech upgrades and spending.

Moreover, it would’ve been the poster child of the right-to-repair movement. A smartphone with a good repair score today usually means how easy it is to replace a damaged part and whether it requires replacing a parent component too. With modularity at its core, Project Ara could’ve set the industry standard, not just hit a high score.

Beyond this wider impact, I know I would’ve been relieved of the constant pressure to upgrade my phone every few years. After a couple of years, my phone’s camera starts to feel outdated while everything else is still perfectly fine — so why do I have to replace the entire phone instead of just the camera module? Project Ara could’ve flipped the entire economy of smartphones, where brands couldn’t constantly push me to switch phones, and I could simply improve the part I cared about.

It could’ve championed the things smartphone makers today only wish for. It could’ve brought back the joy of tinkering with tech — something mostly limited to PCs and home servers — with the idea that your phone could evolve with you. And more importantly, it could’ve given you a sense of ownership over your device, instead of forcing you into an upgrade cycle.

But smartphones as an industry chose a different, more closed-off path.

Project Ara had it coming

Project Ara’s success depended on a lot of things falling into place — across the entire industry. Those small, modular Lego-like pieces you could swap with a click required building an entire ecosystem around them and moving a lot of chess pieces at once. Google would’ve had to establish industry-standard connectors that worked across devices and modules, much like PCs. And companies were expected to bet on a future with zero predictability. There was simply no real incentive for them to commit.

Swapping a module, say, for a speaker meant an audio company not only had to believe in Google’s vision but also invest in building and maintaining production lines for it. In later years, Motorola tried something similar with Moto Mods, but it didn’t take off either. There weren’t enough users, and partners had little incentive to keep investing. It’s a vicious cycle — one that the industry saw coming and steered clear of.

We saw this shift early when Google started consolidating modules to reduce complexity. In a bid to make Ara more practical, it moved away from the very idea that made it stand out. That was the moment when its demise felt inevitable.

There was also a deeper limitation. Project Ara depended on the idea that the core design of a phone would remain unchanged for years, maybe even decades, to keep modules compatible. If you bought into a 6-inch display or a 4000mAh battery, you’d be stuck with that baseline. Over time, modularity would’ve reached its limit, and Ara would’ve been reduced to a mere repairable phone rather than a truly modular one.

And we already have a version of that today in Fairphone. The European brand has managed to build decently specced, user-repairable phones with relatively affordable repair costs. But it still has to release new phone models regularly to keep up with evolving specs, while maintaining parts for older devices.

It ends up feeling like the closest real-world example of what Project Ara might’ve become — great at repair, but far from the ambitious, modular future it originally promised.

The longing hasn’t faded away

Maybe Project Ara was always destined to fail. The future it promised was too good to be true for the users and not sustainable for how the industry works. It had too many moving pieces — both in hardware and in concept — to ever become mainstream. Even Fairphone, with a more grounded approach, hasn’t been able to pull it off even after multiple generations.

But logic aside, every time I have to replace a perfectly good phone just because it’s “time,” or because I’m missing out on new features, I can’t help but go back to the ideal eutopia that Project Ara had us imagine. We almost had something better, but we chose something else.