Google Glass Enterprise Edition has been discontinued.
Google has discontinued its Glass AR glasses all over again. This time, it cancelled the Glass Enterprise Edition, a product that was unsurprisingly aimed squarely at the enterprise and used by people in vertical jobs that required hands-free connectivity.
Google has updated its webpages to say that Glass Enterprise Edition will be discontinued as of 15 March 2023, adding that the company will continue to support the headset through 15 September 2023. However, no new software updates are expected.
9to5Google notes that the only real support that businesses can expect from here on out is if their headset breaks and is covered under existing programs.
However, everyone who already has a Glass headset will be able to continue using it even after 15 September, while developers can also continue to update apps as they see fit. Considering that this is an enterprise product, those apps are what do most of the heavy lifting.
It isn’t all good news, though. Google says that the Meet on Glass app isn’t 100% sure to continue working once that 15 September deadline passes, which means that those who rely on it could be left with nothing to use if things do start to go awry.
The Google Glass news comes as Apple gets ready to launch an AR product of its own. The rumoured Reality Pro headset is set to be a $3,000 unit that could fill the void left by products like Google Glass, but we’ll of course need to see what Apple actually announces before we can be sure. That’s now expected to happen at Apple’s WWDC23 event, likely to take place in June 2023. If that’s the case we can expect Apple to finally show its mixed reality cards at that time.
Will Google follow suit? It’s been rumoured to have continued working on Android-powered headsets despite the demise of Glass.
