It's 2023 and AR Hasn't Taken Over the App Store or Google Play (Yet?)
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Have you heard anything interesting about AR recently? I haven't... Just a few short years ago, however, Augmented Reality was all the rage.
Apple announced AR in the summer of 2017 as part of iOS11 to much fanfare. If you were there you probably remember how exciting AR seemed. Five years later, is that excitement still going?
I was curious to see how many apps actually use ARKit and ARCore, Apple's and Google's tools for building AR into apps.
Can you guess how many apps use those right now?
23,426 iOS and Android apps use ARKit, ARCore, or Vuforia, a non-native SDK for AR. That's more than I expected, but it's only about 0.4% of all the apps available on the App Store and Google Play right now.
AR hasn't taken over apps, yet, at least.
While the tiny percentage is a direct result of most apps and games not needing AR, the small number of new apps using either of those is also really small and somewhat stagnant.
Maybe AR just isn't meant for our phones? With Apple's AR glasses expected to come out soon AR will play a much larger role in apps. Until they do, I don't think AR will take over.
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All figures included in this report are estimated. Unless specified otherwise, estimated revenue is always net, meaning it's the amount the developer earned after Apple and Google took their fee.
