With Ara, a dead battery in the middle of a day trip doesn’t set off a frantic search for someone with a charger. Instead, you pop in a spare. A cracked screen wouldn’t mean buying a new phone, or turning to Craigslist to find a shady, warranty-voiding replacement. It would just mean swinging by the mall to pick up a new one.

But to hear Gadi Amit explain it, Project Ara is about much more than building a smartphone with a chance of outlasting your two-year cell contract. Working with both a small team inside Google and a number of outside experts, Amit’s studio, New Deal Design, has swiftly and quietly ushered Ara from the realm of fantasy to something surprisingly close to a real, viable product.

If it works, Ara could reshape the smartphone landscape dramatically. Its modular design could reshape not just how phones are used but how they’re made, too. It’s an audacious undertaking, and we’ll see if Ara will deliver on its promise. But it’s potential goes well beyond fixing broken screens.