Why modular smartphones still haven't gone mainstream

The smartphone industry has spent years promising users could soon swap a tired camera or slide in a larger battery without buying a new handset. Every few years, a slick concept video rekindles the dream of phones built like LEGO sets. The modular phone remains stubbornly stuck in the margins of the global market.

The story stretches back to 2013, when Dave Hakkens posted Phonebloks and racked up millions of views overnight. Google's Project Ara followed, then fizzled. Fairphone, the Dutch social enterprise, has carried the baton ever since, proving repairable devices can be sold at scale, even if volumes stay modest.

In Australia, where customers carry devices between Sydney's harbourside apartments and Melbourne's laneways, repairability is more than a sustainability talking point. The Right to Repair movement has gained real traction here, with advocacy groups pushing for legislation that would force manufacturers to share parts and manuals. For users holding a phone for four years because flagship prices now stretch past A$2,000, modularity looks like relief.

Even so, the question of whether modular handsets will become a household product remains open. Structural barriers — cost, software complexity, carrier partnerships — continue to hold the model back. After a decade of experimentation, the real question is no longer whether modular phones can be built, but whether the wider industry has the appetite to support them.

What modular actually means in a phone

A modular smartphone is one in which individual components — the camera, battery, speaker, sometimes the processor — can be removed and replaced without specialised tools. Some designs use magnetic click-in backs, others rely on small screws and standardised connectors. The promise is the same: instead of binning the whole handset when one part fails, the user simply swaps the offending module.

The approach splits into two camps. The first is repair-friendly design, where fixed internals remain individually replaceable, as Fairphone does today. The second is fully swappable modules, closer to Hakkens' original idea, where users rebuild a handset to taste — adding a thermal camera for bushfire patrols in regional Victoria, or a chunkier battery for tradies driving between Perth job sites.

Why Australia has a strong case for modular phones

Few markets lean as hard on phone longevity as Australia. Salaries are solid, but flagship prices have climbed past A$2,000, and plans through carriers like Telstra, Optus and Vodafone rarely offer aggressive upgrade deals. Many users hold on to devices for four years or more, especially outside the major cities.

The bushfire-prone landscape adds another layer. During the 2019–2020 black summer, volunteers coordinating via phones in regional NSW and East Gippsland learned how fragile a single device can be in a backpack full of ash and dust. A swappable battery or a rugged add-on sensor would have been a meaningful upgrade over a power bank and a GoPro.

The Right to Repair movement has matured into a credible political force. Federal inquiries have examined whether Apple-style parts pairing should be banned, and small repair shops in Brisbane and Adelaide have built businesses around refurbishing older devices. A modular ecosystem would slot neatly into that culture, letting local technicians keep handsets alive well past the official support window.

The economics holding modular phones back

Designing a phone around standard connectors rather than tightly integrated circuit boards adds bulk, weight and material cost. For a manufacturer shipping hundreds of millions of identical units, stocking interchangeable modules with their own certification processes is a logistical headache that few are willing to take on.

Carrier partnerships complicate the picture further. In Australia, where most phones are bought on a plan tied to Telstra or Optus coverage maps, manufacturers still design around what carriers demand. A modular handset with a third-party 5G module would need carrier approval in each market, and carriers have historically been conservative about hardware they cannot fully control.

Scale matters as well. Fairphone has shown that sustainable supply chains are possible, but its yearly volumes sit in the hundreds of thousands rather than the tens of millions. Suppliers are unlikely to prioritise modular connectors over integrated designs unless they see clearer, more sustained demand signals from consumers.

Software fragmentation and a customisation question

Hardware is only half the modular story. A phone with a swappable camera from a third party must hand off imaging data cleanly to Google or Apple's image processing pipelines. That requires open APIs and a willingness from platform holders to give up features they treat as competitive advantages.

Standardised modules would also need standardised drivers, certification and security updates. Some voices have proposed a Matter-like protocol for phone components, drawing on the smart-home standard that finally got competing brands talking to each other. Until something similar exists, every new module needs bespoke software, slowing rollout and raising costs.

AI features add a further wrinkle. As personal assistants and on-device generative tools spread, the ethical questions of who owns a user's voice data, biometric profile and location history overlap with hardware choices. The framework shaping voice cloning ethics will, sooner or later, shape how a third-party modular component is allowed to access those same personal signals.

How modular could actually reach the mainstream

The clearest path to mainstream adoption may not come from a flashy flagship, but from mid-range devices and the second-hand market. Modular components tend to be cheaper to repair than to replace, which appeals to budget-conscious buyers in Hobart or Darwin, where flagship pricing feels detached from local wages.

Enterprise is a second route. Mining firms in the Pilbara, agricultural companies across the Murray-Darling basin, and logistics operations running out of Western Sydney already use ruggedised handsets. A modular platform that lets a fleet manager upgrade only the failed components has a clear business case, even if consumers stay loyal to glass slabs from Apple and Samsung.

Public-sector procurement could nudge things further. Australian government departments buy tens of thousands of devices for frontline services. If even a fraction of tenders favoured repairable, modular hardware, the volumes could be enough to make component manufacturing viable. It is the kind of quiet, unglamorous demand that built the Chromebook market in schools, and it could work again.

The modular smartphone is no longer a science project. The pieces exist, the demand is real, and in places like Australia the case for repairable hardware is unusually strong. What stands between the concept and the everyday product is alignment: between manufacturers, carriers, software platforms and the regulators shaping repair rights. Until those groups move together, the modular phone will keep surfacing in concept videos, on the desks of sustainability advocates in Fitzroy and Newtown, and in the back pockets of rare early adopters. When that alignment finally arrives, the surprise will not be that modular phones work, but how obvious the whole idea suddenly seems.