The Google Glass companion app might find a new life with Android XR
 

• Google has shipped the Android Glasses Core app in its latest Android beta update.
• Although the Android Glasses Core app in the latest Android beta is empty, it has the same package name as the companion app for the Google Glass Enterprise Edition 2.
• It’s possible that Google plans to repurpose the app to serve as the companion for upcoming Android XR products.

Samsung has been teasing the launch of a new XR product since early last year, but there’s still a lot we don’t know about it. While we know Samsung’s XR hardware is on track for a 2025 release and that it will be powered by a Qualcomm chipset, we don’t know much about its underlying software other than it’s Android-based. We know that Samsung, Qualcomm, and Google are quietly working on a new version of Android for XR devices called Android XR, but we haven’t yet learned how Android on XR devices will integrate with Android on mobile devices. Thankfully, the latest Android beta release may have given us some clues.

Google rolled out the first beta for the second quarterly platform release of Android 15 earlier this week, and it introduces some exciting new features as well as some dormant ones, like a non-functional Linux Terminal app. Some users noticed that Android 15 QPR2 Beta 1 also added a new app called Android Glasses Core. Android Glasses Core is a privileged system app located in the product partition, with the package name of com.google.android.glasses.core. An APK of this app has never been released before, and it cannot be found on any APK hosting sites, or even on Google Play. Plus, the Android Glasses Core APK in Android 15 QPR2 Beta 1 is actually a stub package — i.e. an empty one — meaning there’s extremely little information we can learn from the APK itself.




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