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As 2026 approaches its midpoint, a new study is showing that the market for wearables, specifically “smart glasses” designs, more than doubled, with an increase of 110% year-over-year in the first half of 2025. Tech media cite the work of Counterpoint Research, where analysts found that of this boom, Meta accounts for 73% of sales, notwithstanding new entries by competitors like Xiaomi and TCL-RayNeo.
Now, some are skeptical:
“Not a single absolute sales number in the whole report, not even estimated,” writes John Gruber at Daring Fireball, calling the statistics in the report “Bezos numbers” in a pejorative fashion. “Just percentages. How do you compute percentage change without the underlying numbers? What goes unsaid is that surely any reasonable estimate of “smart glasses” sales numbers is tiny. If you go from 1 to 2 that’s 100 percent growth!”
However, it does seem evident that this market is expanding, in some way.
All of this suggests that as of last year, more people were walking around with these things pasted to their heads, and you would assume the trend continues. But there are also other big initiatives happening behind the scenes, having to do with branded systems that utilize a “base device” to tie the smart glasses to a remote operating system.
Think of it this way: you can either design one of these spec sets from scratch, putting everything inside of the tiny frame, or you can make the glasses to be linked directly to a smartphone, often by Bluetooth, so that you instantly have access to all of that user data that’s in these mini-computers.
Another way to think of it is like this: the smart glasses are the “eyes and ears,” capturing real-time environmental data and relaying it to the phone, which is, in a sense, the “brain” with its pre-existing powerful chipset, and the innate user data, which is kind of like the “memory” of the system. Then, the phone can send all kinds of notifications, alerts and other processed data to the glasses, so that the wearer can see it, Robocop-style. That’s the “augmented reality” part of the system: the output.
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I wrote about all of this a month ago, on news that Apple has been working on its own smart spectacles, to complement the walled garden that the company has cultivated since time out of mind. As I pointed out, this gives Apple a huge advantage: Meta doesn’t have smartphones.
The project, though, seems to be top-secret in a lot of ways, and I couldn’t even find a code name beyond the technobabble moniker “N50.”
So what about Android?
Not long ago, the news broke that Google had introduced Android XR glasses, with partners including Samsung and Qualcomm, where these wearable sets would do a lot of the things that Apple is planning, in the same conceptual framework, where you use the smartphone as the base.
Now, let’s parse this a little. Experts note that Android XR glasses, while “reliant” on an Android phone, might not work so much differently than the Meta Ray-Bans, which also connect to a smartphone. The key difference here is that, with a Google Android or Apple smart glasses product, the maker will have brand and design domain with the base smartphone as well. And Meta doesn’t.
Think about smart glasses that pair with a smartphone for these purposes:
Then think about some of the above use cases, where that connection would go much deeper.
It may be instructive to see how Apple’s design actually works when the N50 appears. Until then, a lot of this is in the realm of the theoretical, but it makes perfect sense to me, that the smart glasses of the future will work in close tandem with a smartphone.
Stay tuned.
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