Apple won't let you use cool augmented reality iPhone apps — yet
yet — A concept video for an identification app, called Augmented ID, that uses facial recognition. — IPhone owners are excited to get their hands on the augmented reality applications that we wrote about last week …
Context & Ripple Effects
As of July 2009, the pieces for mobile augmented reality exist but the distribution does not: a concept video for Augmented ID, an identification app built on facial recognition, shows what camera-based AR could do on a phone, and the L.A. Times had already written up AR apps the week before amid visible iPhone-owner excitement.
What is missing is Apple's sign-off — the company has not enabled the iPhone to run third-party AR applications, so every demo in this category is currently stranded. The bottleneck sits with one company that also controls the App Store, at a moment when Apple is otherwise in expansion mode, pushing an early-2010 tablet launch and fighting Microsoft over 'Laptop Hunters' ads.
First-order effects
- Developers with working AR concepts — including the facial-recognition identification demo behind Augmented ID — have no way to ship on the iPhone, the largest smartphone audience available to them.
- iPhone owners excited by last week's AR write-ups are left watching capability that their hardware arguably supports but Apple's software policy blocks.
Second-order effects
- Rival smartphone platforms become the default proving ground for AR: whichever competitor opens camera-based third-party apps first gets the category's earliest real-world usage data and press.
- Apple converts a technical question into a gating decision, making its own timeline — not developer readiness — the variable every AR startup has to plan around.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform owners rather than developers determine when an entirely new app category comes to market, turning operating-system access policy into the industry's de facto innovation throttle.
- Facial-recognition AR in particular raises a privacy dimension that a single gatekeeper's approval process would quietly become the main checkpoint for.
The trend: Mobile augmented reality is arriving on a schedule set by platform gatekeepers controlling camera and App Store access, not by how fast developers can build the apps.