The smart glasses market has spent the better part of a decade trying to convince consumers that strapping a screen to their face is the future. Google Glass flamed out spectacularly. Snap’s Spectacles remain a developer curiosity. Meta’s Ray-Ban collaboration has gained traction mostly by keeping ambitions modest — a camera and speakers in a familiar form factor, tethered entirely to a phone.
Now a company called Even Realities is making a different bet. A bold one.
The Shanghai-based startup has launched what it calls the first dedicated app store for smart glasses, a move that signals its intent to position its G1 glasses not as a smartphone accessory but as an independent computing platform. The store went live this month as part of a firmware update, giving G1 owners direct access to downloadable apps designed specifically for the glasses’ micro-LED display, as Lifehacker first reported.
The ambition is enormous. The execution, so far, is modest. And the gap between the two tells you everything about where the wearable computing industry stands in mid-2025.
A Store With a Small Shelf
At launch, the Even Realities app store contains roughly a dozen apps. That’s it. The selection includes navigation tools, a golf rangefinder, language translation, stock tickers, and a handful of productivity apps — calendar integrations, to-do lists, notification managers. There’s a teleprompter app. A few AI-powered tools for real-time information retrieval.
It’s not much. But Even Realities is clearly playing the long game. The company has opened its SDK to third-party developers and is actively courting them to build for the G1 platform. The pitch: get in early on a new form factor before the giants lock it down.
The G1 glasses themselves are notable for what they don’t try to do. There’s no camera. No outward-facing display broadcasting your digital life to bystanders. The glasses use a small micro-LED projection system visible only to the wearer, displaying text and simple graphics in a heads-up format. They look, by most accounts, like a normal pair of prescription-compatible frames. Even Realities sells them for around $599, positioning them squarely as a premium but not extravagant consumer device.
The absence of a camera is a deliberate design choice, not a technical limitation. The company has bet that privacy concerns — the very issue that torpedoed Google Glass a decade ago — remain a primary barrier to adoption. By stripping the camera out, Even Realities sidesteps the creepiness factor entirely. You can wear them in a meeting, at a bar, on a date, without anyone feeling surveilled.
This stands in direct contrast to Meta’s approach. The Ray-Ban Meta glasses lean heavily on their built-in camera and Meta AI integration, which lets users point the glasses at objects and ask questions. It’s a compelling demo. But it also means wearing a recording device on your face at all times, a trade-off that still makes plenty of people uncomfortable — both wearers and the people around them.
Even Realities is wagering that utility, not spectacle, wins the wearable race.
The app store launch matters because it represents a philosophical fork in the road for the smart glasses category. Most current smart glasses — Meta’s Ray-Bans, the Xreal Air series, Rokid’s various models — function primarily as peripherals. They extend your phone. They mirror content. They pipe audio. They are, functionally, Bluetooth accessories with better real estate on your face.
An app store changes the relationship. It implies the device has its own computing identity, its own software layer, its own reason to exist independent of the phone in your pocket. Even if the G1 still requires a phone connection for data (it does), the conceptual shift matters. Apps built specifically for a heads-up, glanceable, text-first display operate under fundamentally different design constraints than phone apps mirrored onto a smaller screen.
Think about what works on a wrist versus what works on a phone. The Apple Watch didn’t succeed by shrinking iPhone apps. It succeeded when developers built for the glance — the five-second interaction, the quick notification, the tap-and-go workflow. Smart glasses face an analogous design challenge, arguably a harder one, because the display is even more constrained and the social context of use is more variable.
The early G1 apps suggest Even Realities understands this. Navigation as a heads-up overlay while walking. Real-time translation text floating in your peripheral vision during a conversation. Stock prices you can check without pulling out a phone during a meeting. A teleprompter for presentations. These are use cases built around the idea that the glasses should deliver information at the speed of a glance, then get out of the way.
The Developer Problem — and the Platform Question
A dozen apps do not make a platform. Even Realities knows this. The company’s challenge now is the classic chicken-and-egg problem that has killed more hardware startups than bad engineering ever has: developers won’t build for a platform without users, and users won’t buy hardware without apps.
Apple solved this with the iPhone by subsidizing developer attention through massive consumer demand. Google solved it for Android by making the OS free and letting carriers do the selling. Even Realities has neither advantage. It’s a relatively unknown brand, selling a niche product, asking developers to build for a display format that has no established design language and no guaranteed audience.
But there are reasons to think the timing might work. The broader wearable and AR market is heating up. Apple’s Vision Pro, despite sluggish sales, has normalized the idea of spatial computing. Meta is reportedly working on full AR glasses under the Orion codename. Google has re-entered the fray with Project Moohan in partnership with Samsung. The major platforms are all signaling that face-worn computing is coming — the question is when, and in what form.
Even Realities doesn’t need to win that war. It needs to be useful enough, soon enough, to build a loyal base before the giants arrive in force. The app store is the mechanism for that. If the company can attract even a small but dedicated developer community building niche, high-utility apps — think vertical applications for doctors, lawyers, warehouse workers, field technicians — it could carve out a defensible position.
There’s precedent. Garmin didn’t beat Apple to the smartwatch market. But by focusing relentlessly on runners, cyclists, and outdoor athletes, it built a business that Apple’s broader approach couldn’t easily displace. Even Realities could do something similar for professionals who need information at a glance without the social friction of pulling out a phone or wearing an obvious tech headset.
The competitive picture is getting crowded fast. Xiaomi unveiled its own smart glasses earlier this year. OPPO has shown prototypes. Meizu has entered the space. And that’s just the Chinese manufacturers. In the West, companies like Vuzix, North (acquired by Google), and Focals have been iterating on the concept for years, with mixed commercial results. The recent surge of interest from major tech companies — particularly after Meta reported surprisingly strong early sales of its Ray-Ban partnership — has injected new capital and attention into the category.
But capital and attention don’t automatically translate into good products. And this is where Even Realities’ head start with an app store could matter disproportionately. Being first to establish developer relationships, first to define the design patterns, first to build a library of genuinely useful apps — these are advantages that compound over time. They’re also advantages that are hard for larger companies to replicate quickly, because big companies tend to want to control the entire stack and are reluctant to let third-party developers lead the way on form factor innovation.
The G1’s technical limitations are real. The display is monochrome. The field of view is narrow. Battery life, while respectable for the category, still means daily charging. And the app store’s curation and quality control mechanisms are untested — a problem that Apple’s own App Store didn’t fully solve until years after launch.
But limitations can be clarifying. They force developers to think carefully about what actually deserves to be on your face. Not everything does. The best G1 apps will be the ones that recognize the glasses are for information you need in the next three seconds, not the next three hours. That’s a design discipline the smartphone world largely abandoned years ago.
What Happens When the Giants Show Up
The elephant in the room — or rather, the several elephants — are Apple, Google, and Meta. All three are investing billions in face-worn computing. All three have the engineering talent, the developer relationships, and the distribution muscle to dominate the category once they decide to move aggressively.
Meta is closest to market. Its Ray-Ban glasses have sold well enough to warrant a second generation and expanded AI features. The company’s Orion prototype, shown privately to select audiences last year, reportedly demonstrated full holographic AR in a glasses form factor — though a consumer version remains years away. Meta’s advantage is that it already has millions of users wearing its glasses daily, building the habit of face-worn computing even if the current product is limited.
Apple’s approach remains characteristically deliberate. The Vision Pro established the company’s spatial computing ambitions but at a price point and form factor that limits it to early adopters and enterprise use. Rumors of lighter, cheaper Apple glasses have circulated for years. When Apple moves, it will come with a polished app store, developer tools, and the full weight of its brand behind it.
Google is the wildcard. The company’s history with face-worn computing is a cautionary tale — Google Glass was technically impressive and commercially disastrous. But Google’s AI capabilities, particularly in translation, search, and contextual assistance, are arguably better suited to a heads-up display than any other company’s. And its partnership with Samsung on extended reality hardware suggests it’s taking another serious run at the category.
So why should anyone care about Even Realities and its twelve-app store?
Because platforms aren’t built by the biggest company. They’re built by the one that gets the developer relationship right first. Amazon didn’t invent the e-reader. Apple didn’t invent the MP3 player. Google didn’t invent the search engine. But each built the platform layer — the store, the tools, the developer incentives — that made their version of the product the one that stuck.
Even Realities is making an early, aggressive bet that the same dynamic will play out in smart glasses. That the company which builds the first real app store, attracts the first real developers, and establishes the first real design patterns for glanceable, face-worn computing will have an advantage that persists even after the giants enter.
It’s a high-risk play. The G1 could be forgotten in eighteen months, a footnote in the long history of wearable computing attempts. The app store could languish with a few dozen apps that nobody uses.
Or it could be the seed of something that matters.
The smart glasses market has been waiting for its “app store moment” — the inflection point where the device stops being a novelty and starts being a platform. Even Realities is trying to force that moment into existence, one small app at a time. Whether the market is ready is the billion-dollar question. Whether Even Realities can survive long enough to find out is the more pressing one.
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