Motorola Project Ara: The Future Of Smartphones Is Open Source Hardware

The recently announced Project Ara from Motorola is a groundbreaking  news for all the open source community. If the declared objective of Motorola (read Google) – that of truly democratizing the Smartphone (I would say the digital screens) industry and pushing it towards a landscape where it’s easier for new entrants to create products and compete – is accomplished we will face a completely different Consumer Electronics Hardware industry very soon.

“We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines,”

What was the result of Android so far in the industry

In fact, if we think about the rate of innovation that Android brought to the industry during the last five years, since its debut, the value is undeniable. The market in 2008 was dominated by one company, Nokia, that by the way was struggling to renovate its software platform (and services) in a meaningful way. Symbian was still direct descending from the first versions of EPOC, a very rudimental OS, born for the PSION platform years before.