With Project Ara, Google hopes to do for handsets what Ikea did for furniture, moving the market from high design to flatpack. From next year, it aims to harness emerging technologies like 3D printing to offer a fully customized design, in which a smartphone is assembled to order from a set of modules. If this catches on with consumers, it could alter the economics of handsets, and break down Apple’s iron-fist model, which relies on tight control of a small set of suppliers. Google aims to play up its self-proclaimed open credentials by welcoming third party modules, a move which could create a hardware version of the app store revolution. But this is still hardware, with all the costs that…