As the Wired article references, the hope is that this will kickstart a consumer-driven frenzy akin to the PC industry's trajectories.
It's a long time in coming, notwithstanding that regulations and FCC compliance seem to be the biggest regulatory obstacles preventing this idea from becoming reality earlier on during the evolution of mobile devices.
A way of thinking about project ara and many other developments in tech is "Smart companies try to commoditize their products' complements". Reading this article (old) really opened my eyes in that regard and I have been noticing the pattern in many places ever since: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/StrategyLetterV.html
IMO Our "phones" will soon be a service we login to rather than specific to any one device? If your physical phone breaks you just buy a new one for $50 and log into your cloud based phone. There are already services like that but I suspect it will tip soon for everyone. Aka Google is trying to commoditize the phones AND the carriers.
The recent update that moved Google Voice into Hangouts [1] has made that a reality for me. My phone took a swim a week ago and so I've been using a Nexus 7 as a temporary phone.
The only thing missing is that I had to set up my launcher, install all the apps again, configure my IMAP email client, and configure some third-party apps that didn't sync notification sounds.
[1]: In case you're not familiar, it added the ability to make and receive VoIP calls.
Sorry about your phone. Yeah I'm aware, the signs of this trend are all around. Interesting how hangouts has become a unified communication hub. Close to hitting mainstream IMO.
Why would it do that? Phone owners compete by displaying famous models by famous brands. The idea that they'll compete on hardware specs requires more evidence.
I suspect there's always been a strong element of competition based on physical size in computing. PC cases are about as small as you can take that and still leave room for customisability.
So my guess is the overlap between the competitive hardware concept space, the custom-build concept space, and the pocket device concept space might be big enough to drive a tiny niche, but not a full consumer frenzy.
It's a long time in coming, notwithstanding that regulations and FCC compliance seem to be the biggest regulatory obstacles preventing this idea from becoming reality earlier on during the evolution of mobile devices.