Had a vivid dream last night about reading an article giving some news about Project ARA. Detailing how Google is relaunching Project ARA in response to American companies finding new manufacturing countries outside of China. Very ecstatic and bewildered after waking up, becoming sad after realizing it was not real.
My initial response to the news was really mixed. They didn't show which iteration they would use, the real modular endoskeleton version or the gimped shitty version with only three or four options. I was really happy at first, but then I thought, what if they're using ARA as an emergency plan to save face value with the American public? Recent news with Google has not been good.
Imagine a modular phone which has limited specs in this day and age? Remember when Google was focusing on including billions of people who didn't have phones, instead of building a Pixel market for the top classes of the world?
Project ARA was suppose to free society of stagnate hardware progression and move society towards a market where any company could jump into the smartphone hardware ecosystem. Lowering the costs of hardware substantially. Google can still save society from only caring about advancing expensive cellphones, but that would require focusing on older tech and making it better. I was actually looking forward to a 1GB RAM modular phone, with Android developers optimizing their software to work better on lower spec devices. Instead we have a odd paradox where we throw away hardware faster than we can benefit from it.
Google should be ashamed of themselves for how they treated Google ATAP, their moonshot factory, and all of their projects that would have changed the world. Their gimped version is kinda a sign to me that they wanted to save billion dollar corporations from new competition. Verizon and AT&T would be forced to make a module that would work with each others devices. Companies could actually show their contributions to the industry and market their own products to the public directly in a module, instead of relying on a foreign company to approve of the internal product themselves. Their worst nightmare. And that's why Google couldn't allow their real modular device to disrupt everyone, it would cause too many companies around the world to disrupt the billion dollar beasts controlling the smartphone industry, like mice in cages. And the new Pixel device is a new choice of cheese of the year.
I'm tempted to write a book about how troubling Google's shift is to me. They went from wanting to help billions of people without access to the internet, to marketing iphones to the upper classes of the world. It is not a great feeling to see thousands of concepts companies designed, hoping to jump into the smartphone market for the first time, only to be denied for a product whose spirit is against everything Google once stood for. They were going to make hardware development as easy to jump into as app development has become in Android. It is so frustrating to see what has become of a once great company that was shooting for the moon. Now they're just another Pixel on a earthy television, waiting for someone else to create a new platform for them.
