Google releases ‘sneak peek’ of Glass app development kit
Back at SXSW, Google announced the Glass Mirror API — the first step in allowing developers to build apps, or “Glassware” for its wearable computing device. Now, developers will have a whole new set of tools at their disposal: the long-awaited Glass Development Kit (GDK).
Context & Ripple Effects
Google has been feeding the Glass developer pipeline all year: it opened the Glass kernel's GPL source code in April, let a Duke University team demo face-recognition-by-clothing Glassware in March, and quietly exposed Labs features like 'OK Glass' everywhere and web browsing in May. All of that ran on the Mirror API announced at SXSW, which keeps Glassware as thin cloud services pushing timeline cards.
The GDK sneak peek is the next rung on a ladder Google has been public about: a Marketing Land report in September flagged plans for a Glass app store arriving in 2014, and a native development kit is the prerequisite for apps rich enough to stock one. The story traveled widely for a developer-tools item — pickups at BGR, CNET, Ars Technica, The Register and four other outlets within a day.
First-order effects
- Developers move beyond the Mirror API's cloud-based timeline cards to native Android-level Glassware, gaining direct access to Glass sensors and hardware that the SXSW-era tooling deliberately kept off-limits.
- The teams already experimenting on Glass — from university projects like the Duke recognizer to hobbyists poking at the GPL kernel sources — get an official, supported path instead of reverse-engineering.
Second-order effects
- A native SDK gives Google the inventory it needs for the 2014 app store reported in September: Glassware stops being scattered demos and becomes a shoppable catalog with discovery and, presumably, monetization.
- Opening native development widens the pool of Glass owners who are also builders, tightening the feedback loop between what the hardware can do and what early adopters pay to see on it.
Third-order effects
- If the sequence holds — staged APIs, then a native kit, then a storefront — wearables settle into the same platform economics as smartphones, where the SDK's permissions and the store's curation decide which categories of Glassware exist at all.
- A curated Glassware store also concentrates the privacy questions that apps like the Duke recognition experiment raised, shifting scrutiny from individual hacks to Google's approval process.
The trend: Wearable computing is replaying the smartphone playbook: the platform owner stages its SDKs ahead of an app store to seed an exclusive software ecosystem before the hardware reaches the mass market.