How will the “app economy” evolve around AR? It’s a key question given AR developer platform launches like Facebook’s Camera Effects and Apple’s ARKit.

These moves will accelerate AR’s market growth by democratizing developer capability. They not only give devs tools, but potential audience and reach of Facebook and iOS (read: incentive).

With that backdrop, Tractica projected consumer usage and downloads of AR apps. Segmenting further, it examined AR types, including dedicated AR apps vs. apps that have AR features.

The quick takeaway: apps with embedded AR are projected to outnumber standalone AR apps. This stands to reason, as developers experiment with AR within apps of all stripes.

That will be an experimental process and we’ll see some misfires and unnatural mashups… just as we did in early days of smartphone app SDKs like iOS circa 2008.

As we wrote recently, native development — building for the form factor and platform — will be a success factor, versus cramming together old and new tech because it’s novel and shiny.

The full data set is below and stay tuned for more data spotlights and breakdowns.

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Disclosure: ARtillry has no financial stake in the companies mentioned in this post, nor received payment for its production. Disclosure and ethics policy can be seen here.