Project Ara MDK
Time to get designing, mobile developers: Google has officially unveiled version 0.10 of its Module Developers Kit for Project Ara.
With it, those looking to build the bits and pieces that combine into a fully modular smartphone will have a better idea of what they'll be able to do and what restrictions they're otherwise bound to for their Ara components.

If this all sounds like a bit of gobbledygook, we'll backtrack: Project Ara is Google's pet project — technically Motorola Mobility's, back when Google owned the manufacturer — that's looking to flip the mobile world around by giving customers a chance to fully customize their smartphones as they see fit. To do this, the smartphones themselves will be modular: Users can pick and choose different components from different vendors and, in a first for the mobile world, presumably upgrade their devices on the fly as newer and better hardware arrives.
"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," Motorola said last year in announcing Project Ara. "Our goal is to drive a more thoughtful, expressive, and open relationship between users, developers, and their phones. To give you the power to decide what your phone does, how it looks, where and what it's made of, how much it costs, and how long you'll keep it."
As for the MDK, the 85MB download — clocking in at 81 pages — goes over the various combinations of modules and "endos," or phone endoskeletons (which only Google will be manufacturing at first), that can be used to create one of three differently sized Ara phones: mini, medium, and large.
For example, Google notes that Ara smartphones cannot have any vertical "spines," or vertically configured modules, for their front paneling. All front-facing modules must run horizontal, and only two "ribs," or the horizontal "lines" that create the phone's sections, can appear on the front of a phone at any given time. Ribs must be split, too: In other words, you can sandwich the primary "endo" between two modules, but that's it. The rear of the phone is much more configurable as to the number of horizontally and vertically oriented modules it can support. Aesthetics!
"This is a very early version but our goals are to give the developer community an opportunity to provide feedback and input, and to help us ensure that the final MDK— anticipated at the end of 2014— is elegant, flexible, and complete," reads the Google ATAP Google+ Page.
Project Ara Developers Conference kicks off next week at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. For more, check out Google's recent sneak peek at Project Ara in the video below.