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Comment by panic | Hacker News Reader

Most apps these days run on Android, too, which makes using a single-platform framework like this a lot harder to justify. It's the same reason you don't see many games using SpriteKit -- it just doesn't make sense when you know you'll need to support Android in the future.

I wonder if it would make sense for Apple itself to support frameworks like ARKit and SpriteKit on Android. I think it would make people a lot more comfortable relying on them.

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It absolutely does not make sense for Apple to support this on Android. AR is something that uniquely leverages assets that Apple has: its various AR related acquisitions (Metaio, FlyBy Media, Faceshift, Emotient, WiFiSLAM, PrimeSense) and most importantly their prowess in chip design.

It is trivial for the Android ecosystem to replicate an Instagram for their platform, it will be much more difficult to do this for AR and thus will be a meaningful source of competitive advantage.

There are real economic barriers to having the necessary hardware for AR. High-end Android phones don't ship anywhere near the numbers of iPhones to give it the scale required to make the necessary investments in hardware and software worth it (both from OEMs and Google). And that will ultimately limit the opportunity and market for developers, disincentivizing them to invest in it.

This is an area where Apple's scale, margins and ability to deploy new technologies and see meaningful adoption from users and developers (think about how fast Touch ID rolled down into the entire iPhone/iPad installed base, setting it up for Apple Pay years later) pulls up the ladder on would-be competitors.

You're probably right, but I think it's important to note the difference between Touch ID (a user feature) and ARKit (a developer feature). Users won't know or care about ARKit if developers don't adopt it.

Developers are to ARKit what merchants are to Apple Pay. Users wouldn't care about Apple Pay if merchants didn't take it as payment.

Exactly right. This isn't for iPads, it's for glasses two years from now.

Actually based on rumours the glasses were coming soon like this year.

This is the most relevant post in this thread. Holding up an iPad for hours pointing it at a table to play Millenium Falcon animated chess makes very little sense, but it will be incredibly cool when your friends can all sit around the table with their Apple Glasses on, and see the same AR projection :)

Google is already doing similar, custom hardware and all: https://get.google.com/tango/

But it's definitely on fewer total devices, so Apple has a real edge here.

The fact that Tango isn't on the Pixel means Google has no confidence in it and nobody should invest in it as Google will likely abandon it quickly. It's a shame, I think it's great idea, and they'll only end up playing catch up later if they do.

The reason Tango wasn't on the first pixel is

1. The technology is still new and not yet polished

2. Pixel 1 was a rushed job made in 9 months

3. Tango needs extra hardware that increases cost

I have a feeling that Pixel 2 might have it though, as they had much more time working on it and the technology itself has matured a lot more since, as we saw at IO. Not only that, they also showed off VPS which is a visual position system for indoors using Tango. Definitely a killer feature for the Pixel.

Unreal Engine and Unity is going to have ARKit support. If your ambition is to make an AR app for both iOS and Android I suspect that one of those engines are better.

I don't believe giving ARKit to away makes sense for Apple at all. It is, from what I can see, a pretty advanced technology and widespread adoption of it on other platforms will not help them selling more iPhones.

Of course it makes sense and of course it will help sell phones.

This only works on iPhones/iPads with the A9 or A10 chip. Which means that if you want to use AR then you need to upgrade from your iPhone 6. It also will create a suite of AR apps which only run on iOS.

From what I looked up based on the processors it would be the 6S, the 7, the new one this fall, all iPad pros, and the 2017 iPad.

It says on the page ARKit only runs on A9/A10:

https://developer.apple.com/arkit/

Oops, you're right, not the iPhone 6. I've edited the comment to fix it.

I see no reason it wouldn't work on the SE too, as it uses the same camera and SoC as the iPhone 6S.

Dang, missed another one. Good catch.

Being iPhone only didn't stop Instagram from launching, getting huge, and branching out to other platforms. If this allows you to make a quicker prototype, it's a big deal.

That was when Steve Jobs was still alive. Things have changed. iOS isn't the gold mine it used to be.

It's still a massively popular and profitable platform, though the easy money is harder to find.

If iOS was a goldmine when Steve Jobs died than it's a much larger one now.

When Jobs died in 2011 the iPhone represented 40% of Apple's revenue and generated $3.6 billion in App Store revenue.

In 2016, the iPhone represented 60% of Apple's revenue and the App Store generated $28 billion.

Hardware chart https://edge.alluremedia.com.au/uploads/businessinsider/2017...

App Store revenue 2011 https://www.google.cz/amp/s/9to5mac.com/2011/07/07/apple-iss...

App Store revenue in 2016 https://www.google.cz/amp/www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/a...

The only downside to this wild success is that profit is a lot more concentrated than it used to be. It's really hard to bust onto the charts as an outsider when there's so many incumbents.

For example, sucks to be someone who launched a game this week when Monument Valley 2 took over everything.

Mobile apps in general seem to be a race to the bottom from a business standpoint and Android is much more so that than Apple. I strongly dislike both platforms, and generally harbor a very negative opinion of Apple in general, but if I were to venture into mobile development I'd target Apple first and worry about Android (much) later.

From what I've gathered this totally depends on your market. Creating a paid app or an app targeting US University students? iOS first. Creating an ad supported app or targeting an international market? Android first or use a framework that supports compiling to both platforms.

There's also the possibility that this ends up being very useful to the business market; either for in-house apps or for apps sold to businesses. If it solves the problem they have they'd be willing to pay real money as opposed to the problem of getting consumers to spend.

Indeed. I work for an education company in Mexico. We target upper class schools and the distribution between iOS and Android is roughly 50/50 in our market.

Yes it does, eCPMs are about 5 times higher on iOS.

Apple keeps doubling down on platform specific services and APIs but as their market share dwindles this becomes increasingly untenable. Porting Apple Music to Android was a step in the right direction but they have a long way to go in the new world where services are more important than devices.

How do you mean it dwindles? It seems to hold steady and increase in some countries.

This is a somewhat recent figure I found. https://9to5mac.com/2017/01/11/ios-market-share-kantar/

Depends what stats you consider:

http://fortune.com/2017/05/23/apple-iphone-gartner-market-sh...

But the essential point is that nobody can afford to ignore Android and building to iOS-specific APIs doesn't make sense.

Of course Apple and developers can choose to ignore Android.

The market within the iOS space is huge and if building an iOS only app using ARKit is more profitable then why not ? It's all about ROI. There isn't an equivalent for ARKit on Android and building one would be costly and time consuming.

There is, it's called project tango and they have had development devices for sale for a while (probably a year or so).

How large of a device marketshare could a developer count on at this point from Tango to justify investing heavily in that platform? One thing is for sure, developers can count on a significant share of paying customers if they go with ARKit.

There have been AR libraries for years. Apple is pretty late to the game.

For example ARToolKit is available for Unity, or even Anddroid.

https://artoolkit.org/documentation/doku.php?id=6_Unity:unit...

Unless you are targeting a specific audience (for example artists that use the iPad Pro) for most developers it really doesn't make sense to confine yourself to iOS.

ARToolKit isn't markerless like ARKit though.

There have been MP3 players for years. Apple is pretty late to the game.

There have been smartphones for years. Apple is pretty late to the game.

> But the essential point is that nobody can afford to ignore Android and building to iOS-specific APIs doesn't make sense.

For broad market maybe, but for niche markets a good example would be ForeFlight https://www.foreflight.com/products/foreflight-mobile/ It's pretty much the gold standard among pilots, from private to airline transport, and it's IOS only. Makes support and dealing with fragmentation a whole lot easier.

This is an almost silly point. How many less significant than this features hold companies hostage to Microsoft? So it's ok when Microsoft makes Microsoft/Windows only frameworks and software but not when Apple does it? Sheesh. Of course vendors are going to specialize their offerings.

> But the essential point is that nobody can afford to ignore Android and building to iOS-specific APIs doesn't make sense

Surely you are referring to some future point in time, because most can still afford to ignore Android, use iOS-specific APIs, and be profitable.

I'm willing to bet the only reason they did that is because they already had beats customers on android.

The whole point of these APIs is to let developers make a better apps on iOS so people want an iOS device. If they port any of them to android all they're doing is making it easier for people to leave their platform.

Sure that's the goal but in practice I don't think it's working. People use cross platform tools like Unity or React Native or OpenCV because they know they have to support Android and can't kick that can a year or two down the road like they used to.

Many devs are doing a good life being specialists in a specific platform, whatever it may be.

So then use Unity with ARKit and wait for an equivalent android AR library. I’ve looked into ARKit myself already - it is dead simple to get started. And so much data is already provided, including scale and lighting estimates.

Yes, you lose out on android for now, but in the mean time you support millions of iOS devices in a category that will be getting a ton of media attention in the next year.

Why would Apple port core technologies to a competing platform ? Did Google port Play Services to Windows ? No. And no one would expect them to since it is a core differentiator for their platform.

ARKit isn't a backend service it's an OS library so doesn't make sense to be cross platform.

> Porting Apple Music to Android was a step in the right direction but they have a long way to go in the new world where services are more important than devices.

Are they though? There's still a huge amount of people buying phones and computers, which cost a lot of money, periodically. There's paid services, sure, like Apple Music, which might become self-sustaining businesses, but a lot of these other "services" by the big tech companies are operated at a loss, like email, maps, cloud-storage, messaging, vide-calling, AI assistants, etc.

The only reason to make free services like all those at a loss is to bring value to a platform so users will stick to it, and Apple keeping its services platform-specific makes its platform even more sticky. Apple benefits from this directly, because it makes money selling its platform. To use iOS you need a device from which Apple makes loads of cash.

Google on the other hand is still essentially just an ads company with hobbies, and its profit from the platform its building is much less murky, indirect, and IMHO flimsy. The only way their platform brings them substantial profits is by collecting data to better target ads, which is concerning too.

The lifetime of devices is growing, so in the long term we have to see if Apple can keep selling as many devices as it does; their main source of income is not entirely future-proof. If you ask me, however, Google might be in a more delicate position, especially considering the growing issues with internet ads (concerning privacy, tracking, obnoxiousness etc) and that so many players are in the ads business nowadays. Some, like Facebook, are moving in deep-- challenging Google in user data analytics and engagement time.

tl;dr: Only some services (like Music) make money. All the rest are more valuable if they serve your core business, and Apple is very much doing that.

Mobile platforms have gotten large enough that market share isn't necessarily a useful metric. There are many hundreds of millions of iOS devices out there. That's a pretty decent market to be addressing. (It also happens to be almost all of the top end of the mobile market, so an iOS only offering has a TAM of hundreds of millions of people who are more likely to spend money. Not bad really :)

Plus you have cross platform solutions that are as good if not better.

From game engines such as Unity which have plenty of AR plugins, to SkiaSharp (port of Google's Skia) using Xamarin.

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