Google launches preview of ARCore, a platform for Android devs to make AR apps, following iOS' ARKit, to initially target Google Pixel, Samsung Galaxy S8 phones
Last week in San Francisco, Google showed me an app called Oz. Oz is a kind of augmented reality picture book …
Context & Ripple Effects
Six weeks after Apple opened ARKit to iOS developers, Google answered with ARCore — a preview SDK that brings motion-tracking AR to Android, but only on two handsets: the Pixel and the Galaxy S8. The narrow device list was the tell: ARCore needed carrier and OEM buy-in before it could matter at Android scale.
That buy-in came fast. By October, Samsung had signed on to carry ARCore beyond the S8 (a partnership that widened the platform past Google's own hardware), and by February 2018 Google pushed ARCore out of preview entirely, claiming 13 supported models and roughly 100M devices (the general-availability launch). The preview covered here is the opening move of that race.
First-order effects
- Android developers gain a first-party AR SDK to match what iOS devs already have in ARKit, but their addressable audience is capped at Pixel and Galaxy S8 owners until more OEMs ship support.
Second-order effects
- Samsung's October decision to extend ARCore beyond the Galaxy S8 becomes the template other Android OEMs must follow or cede the AR app catalog to rivals' devices — and Google's six-month sprint from preview to a claimed 100M-device footprint shows how hard ARKit's head start pushed the pace.
Third-order effects
- AR capability stops being a handset feature and becomes an OS-level platform commitment: Google kept compounding the stack with the ARCore Depth API for Android and Unity developers in 2020, and even extended Google Lens toward iOS — signaling that the durable structure is two cross-platform AR SDK ecosystems competing on device reach rather than any single phone.
The trend: Mobile AR is consolidating into an OS-vendor SDK race between Apple's ARKit and Google's ARCore, where each side's device footprint — not app quality alone — decides which platform developers build for first.