It always seems like incumbents have it all (resources, distribution, talent, etc) until they don't. For ex, the "iPhone" theoretically should have come from Nokia by that logic. AR particularly requires truly novel innovations for it to work in mass-market. There might be niche-cases that work for AR (studio/arcade games, sports tech) before the mass market use-cases.
Apple is well documented (for it being a secret project) as throwing tons of resources into compelling AR products.
I'm not saying they're going to succeed, but they're certainly trying - unlike Nokia, who was in the middle of a massive internal war over Symbian when the first iPhone hit.
Apple is (or used to be) very good at waiting for the right time when all necessary components for a good product are ready or close to ready. There is a lot of value in watching other companies fail and learn from them.
Apple has ARKit on iPhones, and it's usable right now.
Apple has the built-in "measure" app, though that can only measure things on a tabletop, and the Mac Pro table-top demo (https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/ in Safari on iOS). The iOS game Egg, Inc. has a mode where you can see your farm projected on top of a nearby surface. It's kind of neat to see the little chickens run around on my kitchen table.
What's holding AR back (on the iPhone) then, is a killer app.
Vuforia Chalk is one for remote support. See what the supportee sees, and point out things, visually, to them. Circle which lever to pull, and using Apple's ARKit[] means the circle stays on the right lever, even when the phone is jostled. It's a cool use case, though their UX is horrible.
IMO the problem is a hand-held smartphone is an awkward AR platform.
[0] Note that there's some vendor lock-in by Apple. The Vuforia Chalk feature I mentioned above is image stabilization and an overlay. Image stabilization (and face detection) is an old problem in computer vision, it's commonly used to add silly hats to faces in video calls.
> IMO the problem is a hand-held smartphone is an awkward AR platform
...doooh! ARKit might be good, but it needs to be coupled with a google-glass-successor. Imo GG was the "nokia 900" of its era, proof that it can be done and there's sort of a market, but worthless without something to make it worth the inconveniences for regular users.
To be honest I'd bet on a social-media experienced company like Facebook or on whoever does a good job at partnering with a social media giant because the only AR applications I'd imagine compelling enough for "average people" will involve social things, like walking around a bar and seeing fb and twitter and maybe tinder profiles of people around you near their heads like game stats, sourced based on facial recognitions from people who set themselves to "open"... will be creepy beyond belief, but I'd bet on a mix of social, mildly sexual, with a dash of gaming thing, like a mix of tinder and pokemon go. Now, god knows who has the chops to pull that one right without getting it too creepy...