The Samsung Galaxy XR is designed to be a showcase for Android In fact, a Google spokesperson told Engadget that “almost all Android apps will be automatically made available without any additional development effort.”
Obviously, Google and Samsung would love to craft purposefully designed spatial experiences for their new hardware, but almost all existing Android apps, whether designed for phones or not, will be considered “Android XR-enabled mobile apps” once the headset launches. This means they will operate in a floating spatial panel that can be moved around the virtual space around you and, following Google’s Android XR developer guidelines, will automatically support core XR input methods like eye and hand tracking, as well as the usual suspects like controllers, mice, and keyboards. They also need to work and look like they would on a smartphone or tablet. “Apps that specify compact sizes display accordingly, and apps that allow resizing can be resized in XR. These apps do not run in compatibility mode and will not be letterboxed,” Google says.
The only apps that won’t make the cut are those that require features that a given Android XR device doesn’t support, like GPS. And in the case of apps that are already updated to run on large screens, or that are “adaptive apps” designed to redistribute themselves and change size depending on the Android device they’re running on, things will be even smoother. Google says responsive design should be the default going forward, an effort that began with the release of Android 16 this year. “Many size-limiting APIs will be ignored on larger displays (including Android
Apple tried a similar, but more limited, approach with the launch of visionOS and Vision Pro by allowing developers to list their iOS and iPadOS apps in the visionOS App Store. This decision produced mixed results and a shortage of true visionOS applications. An app designed for one device is better than one that isn’t, but Google at least seems to have set Android developers up for slightly smoother navigation. Given the cheaper price of the Galaxy XR compared to the Vision Pro, they might also have a larger audience to create apps for.
