The number of downloads of ARKit-applications in the App Store has exceeded 13 million

The total number of applications installed on the basis of ARKit, presented together with iOS 11 in September of last year, exceeds 13 million. This was reported by researchers from Sensor Tower, who decided to find out how things are going with the popularization of the augmented reality on iOS. In this game proved to be more interesting to users than other categories of such applications.

Approximately half (47%, to be more precise) of ARKit-applications settings is just for games. Already a month after the release of iOS 11, ARKit applications exceeded the mark of 3 million downloads, with 35% of them playing games. Six months later, game downloads grew to 47% from 13 million downloads.

Games, of course, helped popularize the augmented reality and before the release of ARKit. Thanks to Pokémon Go, smartphone users saw how augmented reality could bring the game to a new level, and tried to catch animated Pokémon appearing in certain places in the real world, which could only be seen through the smartphone camera in the mode of overlaying the game interface with a real image of the terrain.

The most popular free application was the AR Dragon pet simulator from the Australian studio PlaySide Studios. The most popular and cash among paid ARKit-applications was CamToPlan Pro - roulette in augmented reality from Tasmanic Editions.

If you're wondering why Pokémon Go is not in the top, it's because Sensor Tower analyzed only applications with ARKit, while Pokémon Go came out well before its release. Yes, in the Pokémon Go ARKit elements have been added over time, but still it is not included in the research category.

If you combine all applications with augmented reality, to which ARKit was added after the launch, then their number will exceed 2,000. This corresponds to the figures reported by Apple itself.

Other popular categories of ARKit applications include utilities (for example, the same roulettes or eBay utility that helps to pick up the correct size box for sending goods), entertainment applications, lifestyle applications (especially those that visualize what it looks like a piece of furniture in your room), as well as applications for photo and video (for example, Holo ) and educational applications.

In addition to games, a significant increase in downloads was shown by ARKit applications in the category "lifestyle" - their share from all installations of AR applications increased more than twice - from 5 to 11 percent. This was facilitated by applications from IKEA , Houzz , Wayfair and other companies. The share of downloads utilities, on the contrary, decreased from 19 to 15 percent.

The list of popular ARKit games has changed little over the past six months, with the exception of a few new releases like the Shadows Remain from Halfbrick, the studio that created Fruit Ninja and Jetpack Joyride. From other popular novelties it is worth noting AR Smash Tanks! , Playground AR and Orbu.

AR Dragon has been leading the list of the most popular free ARKit games for several months, and The Machines has become the best and most cash among paid games of the category.

If we consider only non-game applications, then the most popular here are family and children's programs. So, top free leads are led by LEGO AR Studio, followed by Dr. Panda AR Christmas Tree (3rd place), Meow! (4th place), Math Ninja AR (9th place) and Follow Me Dragon (10th place).

Interestingly, in the top of paid applications, on the contrary, mostly utilities - basically all sorts of roulette and other measuring tools.

Apple played a big role in the development of ARKit. This all worked: from demonstrations on stage to new functions of the App Store. Recently, the company even integrated augmented reality into the application for teaching children programming - Swift Playgrounds.

But applications with augmented reality are still at an early stage of development, and as ARKit evolves, new types of such applications may appear.

One of the potentially interesting updates was the release of the beta ARKit 1.5, which took place for developers in January. In it, the recognition of walls appeared - a function through which ARKit can detect vertical surfaces and place objects on them. In this build also improved the interface, added support for video in 1080p and recognition of images based on computer vision. The latter means that applications with ARKit will be able to "see" things that are similar to 2D objects (for example, posters or pictures on walls).

Not only does Apple work in this direction. Google also released ARCore, its ARKit analog, earlier this year. For several months, a number of applications, originally intended only for ARKit, have been adapted for Android with ARCore. Last week, Google reported that the Play Store already has more than 60 applications on ARCore, most of which are games.