Out of the Gate, Apple's Billion Device Base will give them the Edge over Google when it comes to Augmented Reality
The day before Apple's WWDC keynote Patently Apple posted a report titled "While the State of VR Headsets is at a crawl today, the Market is set to Explode with Vitality later this Year." The day of the keynote Patently Apple posted a report titled "Apple's Senior VP of Software says that Apple will have the Largest AR Platform in the World." With The killer demo presented by Wingnut AR put Augmented Reality on the map for Apple and it's bound to be a killer app for iOS 11. Today Bloomberg has posted a report acknowledging that Apple's one billion devices running iOS will be an advantage over Google's fragmented Android.
The Bloomberg report notes that while "Alphabet Inc.'s Google beat Apple by three years in releasing AR tools, its features are on very few phones and haven't gained wide acceptance. By contrast, Apple can easily pair its software and devices, an advantage that will help it quickly make up lost ground, developers say."
It's now becoming a trend. Google Wallet was years ahead of Apple Pay and yet overnight Apple Pay was the more accepted app for making purchases on a smartphone. Now it's likely to happen again with Apple's ARKit.
Alper Guler, who makes AR programs agrees by stating that "When they make it available, my apps will be in millions of phones. It's a major update which enables us to push forward far further."
Bloomberg's report further noted that "Google revealed Tango, its AR software system, back in 2014, with the latest iteration showed off this January. Unlike ARKit, it requires infrared depth perception sensors, and there are currently only two mobile phones available with the technology: Lenovo Group Ltd.'s Phab 2 Pro and Asustek Computer Inc.'s ZenFone AR. Apple's ARKit uses the iPhone's existing hardware, such as the camera and gyroscope, to achieve similar ends.
The crux of the problem for Google is what's known as fragmentation. When it updates its Android mobile operating system, hardware makers and cellular network operators are often slow to send the new software to phones. That means the latest features, like Tango, only reach a fraction of Android's more than 2 billion monthly active devices. Apple designs both software and hardware, giving it more control over when and how its operating system is loaded onto iPhones. The result: 86 percent of Apple's mobile devices run the latest iOS software, compared with 11.5 percent of Android devices that run the newest Android OS.
Take the designers at Buenos Aires-based digital studio Dift Collective, who considered Tango but still haven't been tempted to use it. Yet since Apple Inc. released ARKit to developers in June, the team has made AR experiences including a computer-generated rocket landing in a swimming pool and a 3-D moon that floats in the middle of a living room.
For Apple, ARKit is the foundation for a later, but larger push into AR-infused devices." Patently Apple has also published a number of reports on Apple updating their trademarks to support future smartglasses, a sign their smartglasses project is well underway (reports: one, two, three). You could also check out Apple's Augmented Reality patents here. For more on this, read the full Bloomberg's report click here.
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