At their developer conference hosted yesterday at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Project Ara, the tech-giant’s take on the modular smartphone, announced that they will be releasing a pilot program in Puerto Rico later this year.

Project Ara focuses on creating a smartphone based on individual components, called modules, that can be swapped out at ease to create a fully customizable phone.

Instead of forcing consumers to buy new devices whenever they want to change the hardware, Project Ara hopes to allow consumers to easily change basic phone components, such as the battery, processor, cameras, or even the screen.

“Consumers actually crave choice, but when presented with choice, they seize up – and when they make a choice, they frequently have remorse about making the wrong one. Ara is full of choices,” said Director of Project Ara Paul Eremenko at the developer conference.

Google decided to release the module based phone to Puerto Rico due to its diverse population with a large percentage (75%) of users accessing the Internet through their phones.

“We have to carefully curate and manage the experience. We have a variety of hypotheses, but we need to test them in the field. We have a variety of unanswered questions, and the only way to get answers is to get actual data,” Eremenko said.

The actual phones will be available for sale in mobile trucks, resembling food trucks, that allow for consumers to design and create their phones in less than five minutes.

Currently, Google has developed 11 prototype modules for the latest version of the phone, the Spiral 2. Each module has highly customizable with an independent design and high resolution colors, and can be swapped out with another module using magnets that snap in place.

Although the phone is currently limited to making 3G phone calls, the next version of the phone, Spiral 3, will bring 4G LTE functionality and better antennas for improved performance on par with current top of the line smartphones.

The company hopes that eventually the smartphone will have anywhere from 20 to 30 third party modules available. Module developers are being recruited while chipmakers like Marvell, Nvidia, and Rockchip are working on third party modules.

Although no definite price tag has been decided yet for the phone, it is believed that the cost will vary depending on the number and type of the modules chosen. Project Ara believes that the swappable parts will ultimately cost less than similar quality phones.

Google will be releasing to Puerto Rico through two carriers, Opemobile and Claro. Project Ara will be released globally depending on the response by Puerto Rican consumers.