It has been a long and winding road for Google's Project Ara, and a new report claims this is the end of the road. Sources tell Reuters that Google has suspended work on Project Ara as part of its efforts to bring together its disparate hardware projects. Google, as you might imagine, refused to comment.

Project Ara began life in Motorola's ATAP division, but Google kept that whole chunk of the company when Moto was sold off to Lenovo. Google originally planned a limited launch of Ara in Puerto Rico in 2015, but that was cancelled without explanation. All we've gotten since then are promo images, joke tweets, and that demo video with the breath mint module. However, engineers scaled back the original scope of Ara by integrating components like the screen and SoC with the core of the phone. Google seemed confident about the project as recently as the May developer conference.

Google brought in former Moto president Rick Osterloh earlier this year to unify its hardware business. That might be why we're about to see Pixel phones instead of Nexus phones, and why Ara is getting canned. Reuters reports that Google may still push for the technology behind Ara to launch in some capacity, but it won't be making the hardware. It's been long enough that Google is going to need to either launch something or explain why it is giving up. Hopefully we'll get the full story soon.

Source: Reuters