I've been waiting for something like this, the question is how well does it work? Apple's saving of my old photos to iCloud is actually somewhat annoying – I've become used to being able to quickly browse through my old collections at will. What's worse, the times I have enough downtime to go back through old photos and videos are when I'm on a plane etc. without internet access. Local storage is cheap, I still think I want almost everything local until bandwidth and availability of internet are 10x better than they are today worldwide.
So tell photos to keep all photos on your device?
Looks like a phone with specs close to today's flagship phones. "Ready to hack" is a great selling point, and something that I would like. It's probably more of a competitor to the Nexus line than all of the other phones. This is more like an example of what Google's Project Ara was trying to foster, without the funky hardware. I always thought Project Ara was much more suited for other kinds of devices than phones, and some of my friends were using them for other projects.