The hardware is selling. The category is still waiting on a developer ecosystem Meta's own team hasn't been able to build, and Google, Samsung, and Apple are walking into the same vacuum.
Meta has already moved millions of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, a sales figure large enough to retire the question of whether face-worn hardware can be a real consumer product, and large enough to pull Google, Samsung, and reportedly Apple into the same market in 2026.
The commercial picture is concrete. As Gizmodo's James Pero argued in a June 11, 2026 analysis of the category, Meta has shipped millions of Ray-Ban Meta units, has several additional pairs slated for later in 2026, and has turned smart glasses from a niche gadget into a line item that competitors now have to answer. The same Gizmodo piece notes that Google and Samsung are planning their own smart glasses this year, that Apple is reportedly weighing an entry, and that smaller players have already carved out niches in face-worn wearables. The category is real. The shelf is crowded. The use cases, by Pero's accounting, are still the same handful: notifications, turn-by-turn directions, short video, photos, the occasional live translation. Functional, occasionally useful, not yet the kind of behavior that changes how a person plans a day.
That gap between commercial traction and experiential payoff is the actual story, and it is the hinge on which the next phase of the category turns. Meta's bet, structurally, is that the killer app for your face will not be invented inside Meta at all. The company's open developer program, paired with the Neural Band wristband as a hands-free input device, is an explicit invitation to outside teams to define what a smart-glasses-native experience actually looks like. If a third-party developer builds the thing that makes a person reach for their glasses instead of their phone, the category graduates from novelty to infrastructure. If not, Meta has built a very successful notification mirror and a very expensive way to take hands-free photos.
The competitive backdrop sharpens the stakes. Google, Samsung, and Apple are not entering a settled market. They are entering the same unresolved question Meta is sitting on, and each will have to decide whether to copy Meta's open-platform play or try to define the use case in-house first. Pero's analysis is blunt that the field is, in his framing, far from a "eureka" moment, and that the apps shipped so far read as gimmicky by comparison with the hardware's potential. That critique lands. It is also a critique of an early market, not a final verdict, and the most interesting variable is whether the open developer program turns out to be a real distribution channel or a marketing line on a slide.
The watch item from here is concrete. Watch the developer ecosystem, not the hardware refresh cycle. Watch whether third-party apps start showing up in Meta's store with daily-active numbers that rival the first-party features. Watch whether Google's and Samsung's 2026 launches come with their own open platforms or closed gardens, since that choice will signal whether the industry is converging on a shared bet or fragmenting before the use case exists. And watch the Neural Band, because the wristband is the piece that turns glasses from a screen on your face into something a person can actually use without pulling out a phone. If developers build for that input, the category finds a reason to exist. If they don't, the millions of units sold become a footnote about an early hardware cycle that never found its software.
The glasses work. The category is still looking for its point. The answer, increasingly, is going to come from whoever builds the app Meta's own team couldn't.