Motorola wants to let consumers design their own smartphones.
The Google-owned manufacturer has launched Project Ara to create a free, open and standardised platform to let people pick and choose the components they want in their phones, Motorola said in a blogpost this week.
The goal is to create a standard endoskeleton, or frame, that can hold different modules, like extra-powerful processors, additional batteries or memory chips for storing more music, all based on the customer’s preferences.
“Our goal is to drive a more thoughtful, expressive and open relationship between users, developers, and their phones. To give you the power to decide what your phone does, how it looks, where and what it’s made of, how much it costs, and how long you’ll keep it,” Motorola said.
The company’s vision of do-it-yourself smartphones builds on parent Google’s success with its widely used Android smartphone platform, which it offers for free and allows manufacturers to customise. Android also gives people more leeway to tweak the features on their smartphones than Apple’s iOS platform offers to iPhone users.
Our goal is to ... give you the power to decide what your phone does, how it looks, where and what it’s made of, how much it costs and how long you’ll keep it
Motorola said it has been working on Project Ara for over a year and that it recently teamed up with Phonebloks, an open source project that has also been working on creating modular smartphone components that can be easily replaced.