How come this got abandoned? There was so much financial backup

>>1482696
they dont like the idea that the yearly smartphone bidness could collapse

>>1482696

what is that? fancy battery?

>>1482803
It's a phone that you can assembly by yourself (if you buy parts). For example if you don't do photos with your phone you can choose to have bigger battery etc.

>>1482808
The term you were looking for was "modular"

>How come this got abandoned?

Because it was a shit idea perhaps? Like Goygle Glass. Remember how hyped that shit was? Now its in the garbage.

>>1482696
Probably way too expensive to produce, or something.

>>1482696
good idea, shitty execution

cant have modular design with 'muh thinness'

>>1482696
>How come this got abandoned?

One of the dudes with a prototype liked this girl. That were at this employee relax center with nice chairs. He goes up to her and wants to try to get a date. He was close and someone asked him the time. He drops the phone and it goes right into pieces in front of his dream girl. She laughs. His spaghetti goes flying everywhere. He picks up the pieces and almost trips trying to get out of there. Makes it to his car and realizes he forgot a piece.

Hence Project Ara died.

>>1482813
This, more or less. One of the reasons phones can be so small nowadays is that they can be planned to the nth degree, modularity obviates that.

Worse yet, the modular phone designs I've seen rely on mistaken assumptions about how phones are built. Check out this teardown of the iPhone 6, for example:
https://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone+6+Teardown/29213

The cameras, memory, etc. are a relatively small portion of the real estate. The battery is far and away the largest thing in the phone, and the ICs are pretty much crammed to death on the motherboard. Adding a bunch of modular connectors onto the phone would only increase size and the number of failure points, and the actual added volume to the battery would be virtually de minimis. That's not even beginning to address more annoying issues, like the added ICs required to act as controllers for the proprietary modular connections.

The simple reality is that a truly modular phone would be bigger, more fragile, less compact, and ultimately less desirable than a well-crafted phone by any major manufacturer. It is very likely that anyone who got themselves into those projects learned this and gave up.

>>1482852
>His spaghetti goes flying everywhere
Please let this be the truth.

>>1482856

Rumor has it that they never even had a functional prototype of this phone past the initial tech staged tech demo.

It was vaporware from the get go

>>1482696
the idea is full on fucking retarded

>>1483070

This.

In an era of consumer laziness and reliance on simplicity... a modcular smartphone is just a niche/hobby product at best.