by 
Like many analyst firms, market sizing is one of the ongoing practices of AR Insider’s research arm ARtillery Intelligence. A few times per year, it goes into isolation and buries itself deep in financial modeling. One such exercise zeroes in on mobile AR revenues.
This is one of the main subdivisions of spatial computing – others include headworn AR and VR. They’re all related and share technological underpinnings, but are driven by separate market forces such as their respective hardware bases (see methodology and inclusions).
So what did the mobile AR forecast uncover? At a high level, global mobile AR revenue is projected to grow from $10.04 billion in 2024 to $15.45 billion in 2029, an 8.98 percent CAGR. This sum consists of consumer and enterprise spending and their revenue subsegments.
Drilling down, our latest Behind the Numbers installment looks at one of Mobile AR’s biggest strength: its hardware installed base. How many devices out there are compatible with mobile AR and which platforms have the most reach? These are key questions for AR developers.
Sheer Size
One propellant for mobile AR is the sheer size of the smartphone installed base. Compared to the uphill battle that AR glasses face, mobile AR has an easier climb due to “zero-cost” hardware (the device you already own). Mobile AR has challenges but scale isn’t one of them.
But more important than the overall smartphone base is the growing share of that universe that’s AR-compatible. Given platform fragmentation (see below), the size of that universe can best be framed by its biggest channel, web AR, which has 3.29 billion AR-compatible devices.
As for the other platforms on that list, Meta’s Spark AR is estimated to have 3.05 billion AR-compatible smartphones, followed by ARCore (1.64 billion), ARkit (1.44 billion), TikTok (1.23 billion), and Snap (900 million). Visual search (e.g., Google Lens) operates on 3.19 billion devices.
Here it’s important to note that, though Meta Spark has high reach and device compatibility, it’s mobile AR efforts (and usage) aren’t as robust as other platforms with lesser reach (such as Snap). This is largely due to its deprecation of its mobile AR developer platform, Spark.
Eye Level & Ambient
Another notable AR format represented in the above figures is Visual Search. Led by Google Lens, this lets users hold up their phones to identify real-world items. It’s a growing use case for both general-interest searches as well as (monetizable) fashion discovery and outright shopping.
Generally speaking, visual search checks many of the boxes for potential killer apps. It’s a utility with an inherently frequent use case (just like web search). It takes that familiar web search use case and makes it more visual, which resonates with camera-native Millennials and Gen-Z.
Supporting that appeal are disclosures from Google that it reached 20 billion visual searches per month. Propelled by Google’s broader scale and influence, this figure steered ARtillery’s estimates that visual search has 1.37 billion users (as opposed to compatible devices) globally.
All the above happens on smartphones. Visual search’s real opportunity is in smart glasses, where it’s eye level, ambient, and discrete (no awkwardly holding up your phone). We’re already seeing that in Ray-Ban Meta’s multimodal AI – a central selling point of the hit device.
We’ll pause there and circle back in the next installment of this series with more dynamics & drivers behind mobile AR revenues…
More from AR Insider…
