When VR.org quoted that page on September 28, it said Google Play distribution was “only available for immersive app experiences on XR headsets and wired XR glasses devices,” which left audio glasses with a line about staying tuned and no route to a customer. The same page now says distribution is available for those immersive experiences “and for augmented experiences on audio glasses.” Display glasses inherit the stay-tuned line. Google’s October 28 Android Dev Summit post, which moved several XR libraries to stable, does not mention the change, but the page’s footer dates its last edit to October 20, so the new wording went in sometime in the three weeks after VR.org quoted the old one.
No new track, no new APK
The mechanics will feel familiar to anyone who has shipped on Android, which is presumably the point. “Play Console doesn’t have a dedicated release track for audio glasses,” the guide says, so glasses features go into your existing phone APK on the mobile track without any specific publishing changes, and the user downloads to a phone that then connects to the glasses. A headset runs a full APK on the device, while audio glasses run a projected activity, an Activity inside your phone app that the system pushes out to the eyewear. You declare it with a requiredDisplayCategory of XR_PROJECTED, and the XR_PROJECTED_LAUNCHER category is what lets Gemini find it when someone says “open” followed by your app’s name.
The phone side moved in the same window. Google’s Play services release notes for v26.42, dated October 26, carry one line under Device Connectivity: “[Phone] You can now connect Android XR glasses to your phone.”
Two tiers, and you may already be in the first
The quality guidelines split apps into Compatible and Differentiated. Compatible takes “zero additional developer effort”: an unmodified Android app qualifies automatically so long as it does not rely on unsupported hardware, and the platform carries its standard notifications and Live Updates to the glasses, read aloud on a pair with no display. That makes the first consequence of this change a slightly strange one, because if you have an Android app on Play that posts notifications, someone may soon hear your copy spoken into their ear by a pair of glasses you never tested against, and nobody on your team will have listened to it.
Differentiated is the tier that earns a “Differentiated for Glasses” badge, which Google says comes from implementing a projected activity. It leans on three libraries, and their version numbers are where a plan for December gets uncomfortable. ARCore for Jetpack XR reached 1.0.0 on October 21. Jetpack Projected is at 1.0.0-alpha14 and Compose Glimmer at 1.0.0-alpha22, both from that same day, and Google’s own first-activity sample still opts in with @OptIn(ExperimentalProjectedApi::class). Glimmer’s latest release renamed three AlertDialog parameters. An audio-only app can skip Glimmer, since a runtime check on CAPABILITY_VISUAL_UI tells you there is nothing to draw on, but it cannot skip Projected, so a badged listing on Play can now rest on an API surface that is still free to change under you.
