Google’s AR Design Guidelines suffice while Apple’s fall short | Figma Blog (opens in new tab)

Mobile AR platforms from Apple and Google made immersive 3D experiences accessible to mainstream app developers, but their design guidance remains limited. The author argues that Google’s guidelines are more practical and comprehensive than Apple’s, particularly for object placement and onboarding, yet both focus mostly on simple single-scene experiences. Designers must therefore develop their own best practices for complex, interactive, and collaborative AR applications.

AR Design Becomes Mainstream

• ARKit and ARCore shifted 3D UX from specialized VR hardware to mobile devices potentially reaching hundreds of millions of users.
• Designers accustomed to mature 2D workflows faced unfamiliar 3D concepts and fragmented tools borrowed from gaming, film, architecture, and engineering.
• Apple and Google responded with dedicated augmented-reality design guidelines.

Where Both Guidelines Fall Short

• Both focus primarily on simple object placement and sticker-like experiences.
• They do not adequately address:
  • Object selection and hidden-object interaction
  • Conditional behaviors
  • Branching storyboards and scene flows
  • Teleportation and portals
  • Physical gestures
  • Multi-scene applications
  • Triggered or timed animation
  • Shared and collaborative AR environments
• This narrow scope limits guidance for creating deeper personalization, state changes, and immersive interaction.

Google’s Guidelines Compared with Apple’s

• Apple’s guidance is relatively brief and concentrates largely on placing objects on detected surfaces.
• Google provides more practical coverage, including:
  • Tap-to-place
  • Drag-to-place
  • Free placement
  • Realism and basic physics
  • UI components
  • Onboarding and experience design
• The author questions Google’s assumptions that objects should generally be placed within the user’s reach, since AR may also involve throwing, pointing, or interacting with distant objects.
• Despite its gaps, Google’s guidance is considered the stronger starting point and appears to be evolving.

Designers Must Define New Best Practices

• Official guidelines cannot keep pace with the breadth of experimentation by AR designers and developers.
• Individuals such as Unity designer Bushra Mahmood have created more extensive independent AR guidance.
• Other teams are assembling new workflows from existing tools to prototype functional AR applications.
• This grassroots experimentation may help establish 3D UX conventions before immersive headsets become widespread.

Apple and Google provide useful foundations, but neither adequately supports complex AR design. Designers should use Google’s more developed guidance as a starting point while actively creating and sharing patterns for multi-scene, interactive, animated, and collaborative experiences.