What was Motorola's dream project all about?

Project Ara

Motorola announced the Project Ara, a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones.The project came with an endoskeleton (endo) or structural frame that holds smartphone modules of the owner's choice, such as a display, keyboard or say the battery.

The approach allows users to swap out malfunctioning modules or upgrade as new innovations emerge. This also means that the handset can last much longer than normal smartphones these days.Motorola’s Advanced Technology and Products group was working with Phonebloks creator Dave Hakkens on this platform. The Motorola blog stated that, “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.”

In the next few months, the company plannned to send an invitation to developers to start creating modules for the Ara platform.An alpha release of the Module Developer’s Kit (MDK) could be expected to hit the market sometime towards the end of the year.
Although Motorola has been acquired by Lenovo but the good part is that it has announced that Project Ara would be retained by Google and its team members would now work for Google.