Google's Advanced Technology and Projects group (ATAP) is a skunkworks team and in-house technology incubator, created by former DARPA director Regina Dugan. ATAP is similar to X, but works on projects, granting project leaders time—previously only two years—in which to move a project from concept to proven product. According to Dugan, the ideal ATAP project combines technology and science, requires a certain amount of novel research, and creates a marketable product. Historically, the ATAP team was born at Motorola Mobility and kept when Google sold Motorola Mobility to Lenovo in 2014; for this reason, ATAP ideas have tended to involve mobile hardware technology.

The team embodies principles that former Google VP Dugan used at DARPA. One of these principles is to create small teams of high performers. Another is to make use of resources outside the organizational box; ATAP has worked with hundreds of partners in more than twenty countries, including schools, corporations, startups, governments, and nonprofits. Standing contracts are in place with a number of top-flight schools, such as Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, and Caltech, to facilitate rapid research arrangements when needed.

Although ATAP has occasionally publicized the number of projects in progress, the individual projects are kept secret until they are nearing maturity and it's time to start developing public interest. At that point, they have historically been announced at the annual Google I/O developer conference. Some of the announced projects to date are described below.

The Project Tango team was led by computer scientist Johnny Lee, a core contributor to Microsoft's Kinect. Project Tango was a computer-vision technology that allows mobile devices to detect their position relative to the world around them, without requiring GPS or other external signals. This enables the use of mobile phones and tablets for indoor navigation, 3D mapping, measurement of physical spaces, recognition of known environments, augmented reality, and windows into virtual 3D worlds.

In the first quarter of 2015, the team left ATAP and became a Google team in its own right, making Project Tango the first product to emerge from the intensive two-year incubator process.

Project Ara was a proposed platform for creating customizable, modular smartphones. With Project Ara, consumers would populate an electronic frame, called an endoskeleton or "endo", with rectangular hardware modules for power, processing, memory, screen, wireless, and other functionality. Consumers assemble basic modules to create a working device, then add or remove additional modules as desired – in some cases, even while the device is operating. Optional modules might include cameras, speakers, large data storage, and medical sensors. Since users could update individual modules when better technology becomes available, Project Ara would have provided a hedge against cyclical obsolescence.

It could also reduce the purchase price of a low-end cell phone, by creating the option of buying only the most basic features. This could have supported the spread of technology in economically-disadvantaged areas. The official Project Ara website specified a targeted manufacturing cost for an entry-level device in the $50-$100 range, and stated that the project has "the goal of delivering the mobile internet to the next 5 billion people". Google had targeted the first Project Ara public release for Puerto Rico in 2015, but announced that the test has been delayed until 2016.

A Project Ara Module Development Kit (MDK) would have enabled manufacturers to create Project Ara-compatible modules. An early pre-release version of the MDK was available on the Project Ara website. ATAP sponsored Project Ara Developer's Conferences in 2014 and 2015 to begin stimulating interest in the emerging hardware ecosystem and solicit input from potential designers and manufacturers.