Research into whether react-native-object-capture can offer the same API surface on Android,
what the platform provides today, where it's heading, and what to do about it.
Researched 13 August 2026. Everything here was checked against primary sources on that date — Google's ARCore and Android XR documentation, vendor API docs, and this repository's own source. Vendor pricing and API shapes move; re-verify before committing money or code to any of it.
| Document | What it answers |
|---|---|
CURRENT_STATE.md |
What this repo ships on Android today, and what actually happens at runtime |
PLATFORM_CAPABILITIES.md |
What Android itself gives you — ARCore, depth, hardware, viewers — and which devices |
THIRD_PARTY_OPTIONS.md |
Every route to reconstruction on Android: cloud APIs, SDKs, self-hosted |
ROADMAP_SIGNALS.md |
Where Google is taking AR on Android, and what would have to change |
RECOMMENDATION.md |
The call, the reasoning, and the concrete next steps |
Apple's Object Capture is two things bolted together: a guided capture UI that tells the user where to move, and an on-device reconstruction engine that turns the resulting images into a scaled USDZ. Android has no equivalent to either, and no announced plan to build one.
- Capture guidance is buildable on Android. ARCore supplies camera pose, tracking quality and a depth map on ~88% of active devices, which is enough raw material to reimplement coverage tracking and user feedback — but it is a reimplementation, not a wrapper.
- Reconstruction is not. There is no Android reconstruction API at any level. Every working Android product in this space either uploads to a server or ships its own engine. The realistic options are a paid cloud API (KIRI Engine's REST API is the most accessible, ~$1/scan) or self-hosting COLMAP/OpenMVS on a GPU box.
- Hardware is the quiet killer. Google's own supported-device list shows every Android phone with a hardware depth sensor is a 2019–2020 model. OEMs abandoned ToF; there is no Android LiDAR tier to target the way this library targets iPhone 12 Pro and later.
- Google's AR investment has moved to headsets and glasses. ARCore for Jetpack XR is where the new perception work lands, phones are a developer-preview afterthought on it, and none of it includes mesh reconstruction or object capture.
Recommendation: no action on native Android parity. Delete the misleading stubs, make the
Android degradation honest and documented, and — only if demand appears — add a pluggable
reconstruction backend rather than an Android implementation. Full reasoning and the alternatives
considered are in RECOMMENDATION.md.