Cases study of all ARKit apps on App Store. Almost all.

After releasing ARKit, amount of augmented reality applications in the App Store started growing exponentially. Before on the App Store were tens of apps that were more or less useful. Now there are a lot of applications that are great and even more of them useless. An amount of new user growing respectively.

Using first time application with augmented reality is so exciting and obscure that it’s tough for the first-time user to understand and get value. There is some learning curve. With current best practices, gestures and interactions are natural and intuitive. The only thing that left for creators of AR apps only use them. We should try to make the onboarding process as maximum flawless.

To find out for myself basic steps and main pain points I tested a massive amount of AR applications from App Store. Some of them are awful. Some of them are so great that I kept them on my home screen. Some of them I was not even able to get started.

After realizing how bad, and bumpy can be an onboarding process for new users, I decided to prepare a case study of every step. After defining best practices, we’ll have a chance to focus more on apps and be sure that our users will understand and figure out how to use AR.

I added here tons of screenshots. Some of them show good approaches. Some of them are bad examples. I don’t want to promote, or slander particular developers or apps. Even if one onboarding step isn’t right, the app can be great, or vice versa. So I’m not going to mention here names of apps and will not include links to App Store.

1. Walkthrough

After a user clicks on the cute icon and sees “Made in Unity” screen, he should get the main idea of what this app about is. In regular apps very popular is few steps walkthrough. Of course, everybody uses the option “Skip”, but it’s not so bad way to make the first introduction.

The central question on this step is what is essential information for a user. So let’s have a look at real apps: