Google Cancels Project Ara Launch in Puerto Rico

Project Ara is creating a kind of skeleton for a smartphone that lets users snap on different modules such as sensors or more memory.

Google’s modular smartphone, Project Ara, has been silent for a few months now, but we received our first update earlier today.

If you’ve been anxiously wondering what the future holds for Project Ara after Google became one part of Alphabet, there are new updates straight from the source – although they don’t tell us much. The Project Ara Twitter account had gone quiet from the end of May through Wednesday when a pair of tweets went out, first to see if any Project Ara fans were still around, and the second to explain that the crew has been busy “making stuff”. It’s unclear where the new market will be.

The initiative is Google’s effort to shake up how people purchase smartphones by usingexchangeable parts, which means customers could select a camera from one manufacturer, a processor from another, and display from yet another maker to build a personalized device. It’s pretty awesome, so hopefully Google has some good news to share next week once it clears up this Project Ara mystery. The company apparently intends to continue to develop the program.

The shift comes as Google, the world’s largest Internet search site, heads into a major transformation.

Lost in the tidal wave of news coverage this week about Google’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) decision to reorganize itself and split out its businesses under a holding company called Alphabet was the fate of Google’s many projects under its Advanced Technology and Projects group.

The company has been increasingly conscious about its costs.

The Ara announcement came initially as a string of posts on its official Twitter account on Thursday. The firm described the shift as a “market pilot re-route” and stated it’s simply “recalculating” its strategy.