Google updates Measure, its app for measuring things that was previously a Project Tango exclusive, to work with any Android phone running ARCore
Abner Li / 9to5Google :
Context & Ripple Effects
Measure was built for Project Tango, Google's short-lived bet that AR needed custom depth-sensing hardware. The pivot came last year, when Google stripped the Tango SDK down into software-only ARCore, explicitly built to match Apple's ARKit on ordinary phones.
With ARCore out of preview since February on 13 phone models covering roughly 100M devices, Measure's move off Tango is the first concrete sign that Google's own first-party apps are abandoning the hardware-dependent era for the platform play.
First-order effects
- Measure's addressable base jumps from Tango-device owners to anyone with one of the 13 ARCore-supported models — turning a niche demo into a mass-market utility overnight.
- Tango hardware loses its last visible software differentiator: the flagship app built to showcase it no longer requires it.
Second-order effects
- Other Tango-era developers face the same migration-or-obsolescence choice now that Google itself has signaled its own apps won't prop up the old stack.
- Apple faces pressure to match utility-for-utility on ARKit, since ARCore's stated design goal was parity with ARKit — measurement-style apps become table stakes on both platforms rather than a selling point for either.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, smartphone AR consolidates around software-only SDKs running on commodity cameras, with specialized AR hardware marginalized to research niches — a trajectory the corpus bears out when Google later expands Live View walking navigation to every ARCore and ARKit device rather than any proprietary rig.
The trend: Mobile AR is migrating from exclusive custom-hardware showcases to software-only platforms that treat AR as a baseline capability of ordinary smartphones.