By controlling camera access Meta gets more control over the peripheral ecosystem. And they don't competition with their AI assistant. But camera access is so

By controlling camera access Meta gets more control over the peripheral ecosystem. And they don't competition with their AI assistant. But camera access is so fundamental to true transforming AR, really reskinning and modifying the world, that it is kind of inevitable and they have made noises about opening it. And they began allowing USB cameras within the last year: not a viable sooution for consumer applications, only a tiny fraction of your market will have one plugged in, but at least for now enables research and location based experiences, where the on location event provides the setup. They do already allow depth sensor access which is a form of camera. A more open system allowing trusted access at the system level and empowering the user would allow innovation for providers of thinflgs like you to prefiltering layers to the camera data to blur out text on documents etc. so you could have tiers of trusted apps with different levels of access. And really empowering the user would let you put Meta's own apps behind this layer.