Niantic Labs adds support for more advanced AR to Pokemon Go on iOS through Apple's ARKit developer tools
A very good reason to keep AR mode on all the time — Niantic Labs, the developer of mobile augment reality hit Pokémon Go, today announced that an update of its iOS version …
Context & Ripple Effects
Niantic's move lands a month after Amazon wired ARKit into its shopping app, making Pokémon Go the second marquee iOS app in as many months to lean on Apple's AR tooling rather than custom AR code. It also extends the franchise's hardware reach beyond the Apple Watch companion into deeper camera-based gameplay.
First-order effects
- iOS players get a materially better AR mode — the update gives Niantic a reason to push AR from an optional gimmick toward always-on capture, which is exactly how The Verge frames it.
- Apple gains its highest-profile ARKit showcase yet: the biggest mobile game of 2016-2017 now demos Apple's AR stack every time a player raises their phone.
Second-order effects
- Rival platforms feel the squeeze — with flagship titles building on ARKit, Google faces pressure to make its own AR runtime compelling enough that Niantic invests equally on Android.
- Other consumer app makers face a rising bar for AR adoption, following the path Amazon set by placing products in homes through the same toolkit.
Third-order effects
- The pattern points at Niantic becoming a platform itself: within eighteen months it opens its underlying Real World Engine to third-party developers, and by 2021 productizes that as Lightship, a funded 'real-world metaverse' platform — the ARKit integration is the first step in converting a single game into an AR infrastructure business.
- If Apple keeps shipping ARKit generations — shared experiences in ARKit 2, then depth and Location Anchors in ARKit 4 — the OS layer becomes the real battleground where AR experiences get built, with app makers like Niantic and Amazon as distribution for Apple's stack.
The trend: Flagship consumer apps adopting Apple's ARKit are turning AR from a novelty feature into a platform layer, pulling developers like Niantic from building one game toward operating AR infrastructure.