I was having a conversation with someone in the augmented reality industry today. We got onto the topic of how AR will eventually be used by ordinary people to give them various capabilities, without requiring them to become experts.
This reminded me of the Apple App Store. For the first year of the iPhone, third party developers had only one option: Implement something that would run on the Web in the Safari browser.
That all changed with the launch of the App Store a little more than a year after the introduction of the iPhone itself. Developers were now free to create things like maps, games, educational software, programs for visual artists, or pretty much anything else they wanted to offer to the public, without being constrained by the limitations of Safari.
It’s possible that we will see a similar arc after wearables come out. Third party developers will come up with ideas for useful power-ups that the makers of the hardware never thought of.
On the other hand, Web browsers are far more capable and developer-friendly now than they were back in 2007, while apps can be slow to download and to update, as well as posing potential security risks. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just put on your future reality glasses and run everything from a Web browser?