Google retained the ATAP group when selling Motorola Mobility to Lenovo, and it was placed under the stewardship of the Android development staff; Ara was later split off as an independent operation.

However, on September 2, 2016, Reuters reported that two non-disclosed sources leaked that Alphabet's manufacture of frames had been canceled, with possible future licensing to third parties.

[16][11] Google intended to sell a starter kit where the bill of materials is US$50 and includes a frame, display, battery, low-end CPU and WiFi.

Similarly to Android apps, an Ara device would be configured by default to only accept modules officially certified by Google, but users would have been able to disable this.

[13] Project Ara was developed and was led by Paul Eremenko,[11][17] who in 2015 became CEO of the Airbus Group Silicon Valley technology and business innovation center.

The core Project Ara team at Google consisted of three people, with most of the work being done by outside contractors, such as NK Labs, a Massachusetts-based engineering firm.

Unrelated to work done by the Ara team, [11] Dutch designer Dave Hakkens announced the Phonebloks modular phone concept independently in September 2013.

[20] Motorola Mobility went on a 5-month road trip throughout the United States in 2013 called "MAKEwithMOTO" to gauge consumer interest in customized phones.

[11] Subsequent versions were to be built around a much more efficient and higher performance ASIC implementation of UniPro, running over a capacitive M-PHY physical layer.

[22] In January 2015, Google unveiled the "Spiral 2" prototype, and that it planned to test market a later revision of the system in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico later in the year.

Google chose the region due to it having a large mobile phone market, and because it is still subject to U.S. telecommunications laws—allowing for continued correspondence with the FCC.

[10] Initial reception to an earlier but similar modular phone concept—Phonebloks—was mixed, citing possible infeasibility, lack of a working prototype, as well as other production and development concerns.

Eremenko says modularity would create a difference of less than 25% in size, power, and weight to components, and he believes that is an acceptable trade-off for the added flexibility.