Over a year ago, I reported about Project Ara, a modular smartphone device that was meant to revolutionize the entire smartphone industry in Puerto Rico, it’s startup location but also the entire world. Project Ara has definitely changed over the past year. It experienced a few business changes, a few company changes and went completely silent for the better part of 2015. Now, over three years after the first announcement, Ara is ready and set to go live starting in 2017.

Project Ara, if somewhat a hazy memory, is the first idea and prototype of a completely modular phone, meaning that it has the ability to swap parts quickly and easily. For instance, one can switch out a battery, giving the phone extra juice for long plane trips or plug in a more powerful processor when a new one comes out at the blink of an eye. It’s the first phone to stop caring about later upgrades and models as it can be completely and constantly upgraded from the screen to the peripherals to the operating system and software. It’s the first phone to practically last forever. At least that was the idea in May 2014, when the first prototype was unveiled at Google’s annual I/O conference, a conference held to show off new hardware and software. The prototype garnered incredible reaction from audiences and the public, providing optimism for what could come next for phones. The idea was approved and the devs were sent off to join Google ATAP, (Advanced Technology and Projects), the same offices that are currently working on virtual reality headsets and self-driving cars.

Alas, it would seem that the phone to last forever wouldn’t see its first glimpse of light when in early of 2015, the first prototype broke when accidentally dropped. It would seem that versatility would have to take a back seat to durability. Throughout the entire year of 2015, little news came out about the project as the phone’s future looked bleak. Whilst devs at Google were hard at work hoping to fix structural issues, other companies like LG with their 2015 flagship phone, the G4, and Nexpaq, a Kickstarter campaign for a modular iPhone case, boasted modular capabilities in their products. Now with modular cell phones easing their way into the market, Project Ara faces a new obstacle: consumers.

They’ve certainly learned a lot over their year of silence. For instance, new market research shows that consumers aren’t ready for a fully customizable, modular smartphone. Many consumers feel as if building a phone from scratch isn’t as appealing as buying a pre-packaged, pre-limited phone already manufactured with pre-selected capabilities. It’s a strange way at looking at developing technology, but it’s the way that the New Ara is forced to look. Now, instead of focusing on infinite possibilities of an endless smartphone, Ara looks to cheat death by offering users the option to upgrade several finite features of the pre-entitled smartphone. Now, instead of picking and choosing what physical and operational features the phone can have, Ara now aims to give the user a complete, yet customizable package. Your decision, when it comes to technological specs and stats have already been made as it comes with the pre-assembled phone exoskeleton. Your decision on accessories like longer-lasting batteries and bigger speakers fill in the physical gaps in the phone. It’s a diet version of what Project Ara was.

Although steps have been made to cut back on customization, it ultimately helps the popularity and future potential the phone could have. Technology, much like people, takes years and years to develop. It takes careful nurturing and baby steps of progress to get a final product that’s ready to take on the world. Like how people in one’s life can affect lifestyle choices and identity, people influence the way technology changes and how it functions. Take 4K HD televisions for example. We, as a society of constantly advancing technological human beings, have been able to shoot, capture and present video in 4K Ultra HD definitions for over ten years now as the technology has been developing since 2005. The reason why it seems to only be catching on now is because for the last fifteen years, we’ve been constantly shifting our attention to HD video, a technology that’s been available since the early 90s. Like 4K, modular phones need to take small baby steps of improvement. Likewise, the smartphone,  just like HD video, still needs a bit of time to develop. Maybe in ten to twenty years, we will have a fully functional, completely modular smartphone. After all, the smartphone has only been around for ten years now commercially.

The future relies on these small baby steps of improvement and the New Ara serves as this first step into the future. If it is successful, then the future will come soon. If not, there’s always development. The Ara is set to come out in 2017 with development kits for the new platform to be released as soon as this fall. The future is soon. How soon is a question that could be answered by the Ara.