For years Apple has extolled the virtues of augmented reality (AR) technology, and just last year the company finally delivered with the ARKit framework that allowed iOS developers to created AR-based apps for the platform. It turns out that ARKit is proving to be quite a hit because according to Sensor Tower, over 13 million ARKit-based apps have been downloaded since.
According to their breakdown of the apps, unsurprisingly a bulk of the downloads (47%) belonged to games. This was followed by utility apps, entertainment apps, lifestyle apps (such as IKEA’s Place), photo and video, education, and then everything else. Like we said the fact that the major of ARKit apps are games isn’t surprising especially when you consider what a huge hit Pokemon GO was when it first launch.
AR games aren’t a new concept and in fact the folks at Niantic had actually attempted to launch another AR game before Pokemon GO, although admittedly that did not quite have the same impact Pokemon GO did, thanks largely to the popularity of the Pokemon franchise. That being said, we are still somewhat in the early stages of AR tech and we expect that eventually there will be more complex and useful apps that could come out of it. In the meantime hopefully the popularity will encourage more developers to dabble in the tech, whether it be ARKit or Google’s ARCore.
Filed in . Read more about Apps, Augmented Reality (AR) and iOS.