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Comment by joshmarinacci | Hacker News Reader

I can think of plenty of use for modules. The problem is that none of them are general purpose. There are tons of niche applications though. They should have made an industrial phone for $1000. Lots of people would have bought them for interesting use cases that Google never would have thought of.

The challenge is that a hackable industrial strength phone is not a ten billion dollar business, which is what Google wants.

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there are so many things that google markets poorly, or to the wrong audience.

glass would have been amazing for industrial or many professional jobs, wave was a collaboration tool released to individuals, and now this where people want "an input device" for a niche application and would currently pay tens of thousands of dollars for such a thing.

it's really quite upsetting that all these fantastic technologies are wasted because of this push for "social" and mass market.

Looking from the outside in, it seems the problem is with management. I have never worked at Google, but I know many people who have. None of them have said positive things about their managers. Obviously this is anecdotal, but I see little reason to believe otherwise.

One big thing here is that Ara was part of ATAP which was acquired from Motorola (back when Google owned Motorola). So the culture of this project is an unusual one, even for Google. The heavy dependence on outside contractors probably made for a complicated setup, but I don't think that was the problem. From the outside, it feels like ATAP/Project Ara just ran the clock out. If they'd have gotten the phone done and ready to ship faster, maybe things would be different today.

I work at Google, and have had several managers during my two stints at the company, all of whom I consider to be quite good.

Glass is now being used for medical and industrial purposes

Really? I was under the impression that Glass was discontinued. Can you provide any links?

https://developers.google.com/glass/distribute/glass-at-work

Found this! :D

Anything niche but important enough to warrant a $1000 phone that could take another $xxx component is also something that could easily have a $xxx USB-C component.

> a $xxx USB-C component

Which you plug into your laptop. Which is a technological device that everyone has, and which is (to a degree) extensible. Or it's a PCIe card, and it slots into your PC.

The idea behind Ara is that your phone could do what the laptop or PC can do.

I'm running an LG G5 with the Cam+ adapter right now. It's a fantastic idea, but hamstrung by the fact that there are only a handful of modules and they're all proprietary.

Phones can use already USB peripherals. Just look at the FLIR One and Seek thermal cameras, which start at $200 compared to ~$600 for a mediocre phone with a thermal camera or ~$500 for a dedicated thermal camera device.

No, I think the person you replied to meant that you can make a USB-C accessory for the phone. USB-C ports are on phones, in fact the majority of new Android phones now have them.

Yes, but that also has the advantage of not tieing you to the phone, and not tieing you to a specific phone. At the very least, if someone wants to make a componentised phone like this, they should make (at least a subset of) the interface electrically compatible to USB C, so you could have a cheap/simple mechnical adapter to use most modules with any USB C capable hardware to widen appeal.

Some sort of standardized form factor for small embeddable hardware with dimensions that makes it feasible for one of the "carriers" could be a phone would be interesting.

In fact, doing it by starting with creating some dev boards with various functionality + the adapter first, and only considering a phone if/when it gets traction could make it viable for someone to bootstrap or do on kickstarter.

The problem was going straight for a phone which has pretty much no advantages applicable to a large enough group of users to be viable until/unless there's a large ecosystem of interesting modules first.

> At the very least, if someone wants to make a componentised phone like this, they should make (at least a subset of) the interface electrically compatible to USB C, so you could have a cheap/simple mechnical adapter to use most modules with any USB C capable hardware to widen appeal.

Good point.

I see the Ara project as trying to pioneer PCIe for phone modules. If a lot of phones had Ara-compatible modules, that would be great. It's just that there's only Ara right now.

Many of the things you might want to attach don't fit into the flush form factor. A credit card reader. An ultrasonic scanner for imaging. Various medical sensors.

A phone where you could clamp sizable accessories onto one end might be more useful.

Indeed. Even having to figure out a way to hold my phone while it's external battery pack is plugged in is a pain. I used to just swap batteries, back when that was possible. My phone is capable of having a lot of things plugged into it, but it stops working well as a handheld device at that point.

All the modularity one would ever need is a robust mechanical interface for the back side cover and a ribbon connector standard for internal USB (a convention might even be enough, e.g. "microSD with wires"), or at least power.

The mechanical challenge of integrating your combined pong controller wheel/tire pressure gauge (or whatever your personal long tail use case might be) into a custom made back cover would be the excuse for existence all those dust-gathering 3D-printers have been waiting for.

Yep would have been amazing in the industrial industry. However industrial industry is all about low volume high unit cost.

As for an example industrial phone here's an RFID reader Android phone for 2.5k. https://www.atlasrfidstore.com/trimble-juno-t41-rugged-rfid-...

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