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Even with ARCore and the new ML system in Oreo, Google can’t match iOS, due to the install base of Oreo being nothing now, and won’t be over 20% for another 2 y

Even with ARCore and the new ML system in Oreo, Google can’t match iOS, due to the install base of Oreo being nothing now, and won’t be over 20% for another 2 years. Apple's ARkit is going to bring a whole new swath of exclusive apps to iOS. These APIs currently can’t be recreated on android, which means most apps wont be able to be ported with all features, if at all. It’s becoming harder and harder for devs to be cross platform and Google is falling behind Apple.

cromwellian 9y ago
I see it as precisely the opposite. It seems like the tendency to engage in platform wars obscures the larger issue that this is all going to settle down and converge over time and nothing Google or Apple is doing right now will be the final form of AR. Remember early 3D in the 90s? We have S3 Virge VX, Voodoo 3dfx, PowerVR, Rendition Verite, Matrox, TNT, etc They had a huge disparity in capabilities, fillrates, APIs, most didn't support OpenGL, even 3dfx -- the card closest to what games settled on as a minimum set of functionality, only supported Carmack's miniGL. Early DirectDraw and Direct3D were horrendous and to get performance, Games had to be ported to each card's proprietary APIs, and effectively, Quake and Unreal became the Unity of their day, offering a higher level abstraction to building cross platform titles until the cards all converged on OpenGL. And converge they did. Eventually most cards offered similar fillrate, multitexturing, and fixed pipeline options, the market settled on a common hardware featureset, and then competed on price and performance. Later, programmable shaders disrupted the market again, and we went though iterations of pixel/vertex shaders from 1.0/1.1/1.2/1.3/1.4 to 2.0 to 3.0 and then GLSL and finally something like CUDA. I think we're going to see the same thing happen in mobile and whatever fanboys propose as some kind of insurmountable advantage will turn out to get commodified if it becomes successful. For example, if AR takes off, or if Apple adds a depth sensor and Tango-like functionality takes off and a huge startup market and VC funding coalesces around it, then roughly 1-2 years later, every Asian OEM will have Android devices with depth cameras and similar functionality. The only reason for the discrepancy today is the hardware fragmentation. But the market follows the money and abhors a vacuum. Hardware convergence in capabilities always follows, and eventually developers end up with middleware to address it. This does lead to "IOS first" for startups, but if you look at the App Store and Play Store today, practically every major game and app you want is available on both platforms. It'll take years for this to shake out, but if AR becomes huge, smartphones in 5 years will all have roughly a similar set of features. P.S. My own opinion is that phone's viewport is too small for a great AR experience. It's a nice initial experience and visually impressive, but will quickly become tiring. The long term form of this has to be some form of glasses, because waving around a phone in all directions and holding it in midair while touching the UI is kind of awkward.
- Eridrus 9y ago
  I don't know about the game market in detail, but when I see people indie mobile games 80% of the time they're building for iOS, and saying they'll look at an Android port if the game does well. Obviously if they built using Unity it should be a simpler port, but clearly not all of them do.
  - cromwellian 9y ago
    There's plenty of cross platform tools for games now. If you build with Unity or Unreal, you hit multiple platforms at once, including Steam and consoles. If you're doing a 2D game, theres lots of middleware options as well. Yes, people build for iOS first because you only have to test for a few devices -- its like developing for fixed console HW -- and because iOS users tend to spend more. But most indie games that make money eventually quickly saturate on each platform, and so devs go multiplatform relatively quickly when they make out revenue on a given platform. The games business is pretty tough if you're not a triple-A breakout hit.
    - Eridrus 9y ago
      So if you want to play the largest variety of indie games, rather than just the hits you're better off buying an iPhone.
      - izacus 9y ago
        No, that's not what he said. You just reiterated your (misguided) post.
      - cromwellian 9y ago
        I guess it depends on if you care about early adoption or not or what country you're in. Most of the indie games are available on Android. And if you happen to be in Asia, much of the indie games target Android first. I just don't think most people care about these issues, both platforms have a huge software library, and both have a huge number of users. I'm kind of tired of people turning technical threads into platform war discussions. If you're a loyal iOS developer or user, why do you care about what Android does? This announcement is only positive. For Android users, it signals platform level AR support. And for AR fans, it signifies a growing convergence on a low hanging fruit "AR-lite" that will be available to both platforms. It would be like if only one platform had a Web browser and suddenly the other platform got a browser, and people we're all angry like "Well, platform #1 had a browser first! And it has more websites that optimize for it!" The real story is "hey, now there are two web browsers, and the web will be larger" The endgame is AR-lite now has two platforms competing. That's good for users, and good for developers, despite an intermediate period of chaos and fragmentation as things evolve.
mikeevans 9y ago
>new ML system in Oreo Do you mean Tensorflow Lite? That's not part of Oreo, so shouldn't be something people have to wait 2 years for.

cromwellian 9y ago

I see it as precisely the opposite. It seems like the tendency to engage in platform wars obscures the larger issue that this is all going to settle down and converge over time and nothing Google or Apple is doing right now will be the final form of AR. Remember early 3D in the 90s? We have S3 Virge VX, Voodoo 3dfx, PowerVR, Rendition Verite, Matrox, TNT, etc They had a huge disparity in capabilities, fillrates, APIs, most didn't support OpenGL, even 3dfx -- the card closest to what games settled on as a minimum set of functionality, only supported Carmack's miniGL. Early DirectDraw and Direct3D were horrendous and to get performance, Games had to be ported to each card's proprietary APIs, and effectively, Quake and Unreal became the Unity of their day, offering a higher level abstraction to building cross platform titles until the cards all converged on OpenGL. And converge they did. Eventually most cards offered similar fillrate, multitexturing, and fixed pipeline options, the market settled on a common hardware featureset, and then competed on price and performance. Later, programmable shaders disrupted the market again, and we went though iterations of pixel/vertex shaders from 1.0/1.1/1.2/1.3/1.4 to 2.0 to 3.0 and then GLSL and finally something like CUDA. I think we're going to see the same thing happen in mobile and whatever fanboys propose as some kind of insurmountable advantage will turn out to get commodified if it becomes successful. For example, if AR takes off, or if Apple adds a depth sensor and Tango-like functionality takes off and a huge startup market and VC funding coalesces around it, then roughly 1-2 years later, every Asian OEM will have Android devices with depth cameras and similar functionality. The only reason for the discrepancy today is the hardware fragmentation. But the market follows the money and abhors a vacuum. Hardware convergence in capabilities always follows, and eventually developers end up with middleware to address it. This does lead to "IOS first" for startups, but if you look at the App Store and Play Store today, practically every major game and app you want is available on both platforms. It'll take years for this to shake out, but if AR becomes huge, smartphones in 5 years will all have roughly a similar set of features. P.S. My own opinion is that phone's viewport is too small for a great AR experience. It's a nice initial experience and visually impressive, but will quickly become tiring. The long term form of this has to be some form of glasses, because waving around a phone in all directions and holding it in midair while touching the UI is kind of awkward.

Eridrus 9y ago
I don't know about the game market in detail, but when I see people indie mobile games 80% of the time they're building for iOS, and saying they'll look at an Android port if the game does well. Obviously if they built using Unity it should be a simpler port, but clearly not all of them do.
- cromwellian 9y ago
  There's plenty of cross platform tools for games now. If you build with Unity or Unreal, you hit multiple platforms at once, including Steam and consoles. If you're doing a 2D game, theres lots of middleware options as well. Yes, people build for iOS first because you only have to test for a few devices -- its like developing for fixed console HW -- and because iOS users tend to spend more. But most indie games that make money eventually quickly saturate on each platform, and so devs go multiplatform relatively quickly when they make out revenue on a given platform. The games business is pretty tough if you're not a triple-A breakout hit.
  - Eridrus 9y ago
    So if you want to play the largest variety of indie games, rather than just the hits you're better off buying an iPhone.
    - izacus 9y ago
      No, that's not what he said. You just reiterated your (misguided) post.
    - cromwellian 9y ago
      I guess it depends on if you care about early adoption or not or what country you're in. Most of the indie games are available on Android. And if you happen to be in Asia, much of the indie games target Android first. I just don't think most people care about these issues, both platforms have a huge software library, and both have a huge number of users. I'm kind of tired of people turning technical threads into platform war discussions. If you're a loyal iOS developer or user, why do you care about what Android does? This announcement is only positive. For Android users, it signals platform level AR support. And for AR fans, it signifies a growing convergence on a low hanging fruit "AR-lite" that will be available to both platforms. It would be like if only one platform had a Web browser and suddenly the other platform got a browser, and people we're all angry like "Well, platform #1 had a browser first! And it has more websites that optimize for it!" The real story is "hey, now there are two web browsers, and the web will be larger" The endgame is AR-lite now has two platforms competing. That's good for users, and good for developers, despite an intermediate period of chaos and fragmentation as things evolve.

mikeevans 9y ago

>new ML system in Oreo Do you mean Tensorflow Lite? That's not part of Oreo, so shouldn't be something people have to wait 2 years for.