Should You Build an App for Meta Smart Glasses Yet?

Founders and brands keep asking us the same nine questions about building for Ray-Ban Display and Meta AI glasses. Here are the honest answers, including the one that talks most people out of it.

Meta opened its smart glasses to outside developers this year. Since then we have had a steady stream of the same conversation: a founder or a brand team has an idea for the glasses, they are not sure if it is possible, and they are even less sure if now is the moment.

It is a fair thing to be unsure about. The honest answer for most people is "not yet." For a smaller group it is "yes, and the timing is the whole advantage."

This is what we tell people who ask. No jargon, and nothing you need an engineering background to follow. If you want the technical version, that lives on our Meta Wearables page.

First, what we actually do here

Foundri builds apps for Meta's glasses. There are two ways to do it and we build both.

The first is adding glasses support to a phone app you already have. Your app stays the brain. The glasses become its eyes and ears, so your user can point their face at something instead of pulling out their phone.

The second is building something small and new that runs on the Meta Ray-Ban Display, the pair with a screen in the lens. No phone app needed.

Which one is right depends on your business, not your taste. That is usually the first thing we settle, and it takes one conversation.

What can one of these apps actually do today?

More than people expect on the input side, less than people expect on the output side.

Your app can see what your user sees through the camera, take photos, listen through the microphone, and speak through the speakers in the frames. On the Ray-Ban Display it can also put text, pictures, buttons, and video in front of one eye.

What it cannot do is be a phone on your face. The screen is small and sits off to the side of your vision. It is built for a glance, not for reading. If your idea needs someone to look at it for more than a few seconds at a time, it is not a glasses idea yet.

Can I sell it in an app store?

Not yet, and this is the single most important thing to understand before you spend anything.

Meta's glasses platform is in what they call Developer Preview. You can build a real app. You can put it on real glasses. You can share it with a limited group of testers. What you cannot do is publish it to the public and start collecting customers, because the store for that does not exist yet.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is either confused or selling you something.

That does not make building now pointless. It makes the reason for building now different. You are not launching a product this quarter. You are buying a head start, learning what works on a new kind of device before your competitors can, and being ready on day one instead of starting from zero when the doors open.

If you need revenue from this in the next six months, wait. If you are playing a longer game, keep reading.

Do my customers need to own the glasses?

Yes, and that is the real ceiling on this right now.

Whatever you build only reaches people who bought a pair. That is a small and specific group today. It is growing, and Meta is clearly committed to it, but you should size the opportunity honestly rather than assuming your whole customer base comes along.

This is why the strongest early cases are not consumer apps. They are situations where somebody else buys the hardware for a reason: a company outfitting field crews, a team that already needs hands free, a brand doing something at an event where they provide the glasses.

Do we need a phone app too?

Only for one of the two paths.

If you are extending an existing phone app to the glasses, then yes, by definition, you already have one. That is the point of that path.

If you are building a small standalone experience for the Ray-Ban Display, no. It runs on the glasses on its own. That is usually the cheaper and faster place to start, and it is often the right way to test an idea before committing to the bigger version.

How do people control it? There is no touchscreen.

This surprises everyone, and it changes more about the design than any other single fact.

The Ray-Ban Display comes with a wristband that reads the muscle signals in your forearm. Small finger movements become the controls. You swipe to move around, pinch with your index finger to confirm, and pinch with your middle finger to cancel.

That is close to the entire vocabulary. Swipe, yes, no.

Think about what that means for your idea. Anything that assumes a keyboard, a form, a menu with fifteen options, or precise tapping does not survive contact with it. The upside is real though: your user can act without raising their hands or saying anything out loud. In a warehouse, a kitchen, a hospital, or a meeting, that is worth a great deal.

What does it cost, and how long does it take?

A working prototype on real glasses usually takes three to four weeks. A full build is more typically eight to twelve weeks depending on what it does.

The cost tracks that, and it is in the same range as a well-scoped mobile app. Glasses are not exotic enough to carry a premium anymore.

The part people forget to budget for is the hardware itself. Some of the work can be done without glasses, but nothing involving the display can be truly finished without a pair in hand. Assume you are buying the devices.

Is it too early? Should we just wait?

For most companies, honestly, yes. Wait.

Here is the test we use. Waiting is right if your idea would work about as well on a phone, if you need this to make money soon, or if your customers have no particular reason to own smart glasses.

Building now is right if your idea genuinely needs someone's hands free and their eyes up, if the people you serve already wear or would be given the hardware, or if being early to a new device is itself worth something to your brand.

That second list is shorter. That is the point of having the test.

What happens when the platform changes underneath us?

It will. The tools Meta gives developers are still early and still moving, and anyone building here is building on ground that shifts.

The way to handle that is not to pretend otherwise. It is to build so that a change costs you a week instead of a rewrite: keep the parts that are specific to the glasses thin and separate from the parts that hold your actual business logic, and expect to touch it again.

We say this out loud at the start of a project rather than discovering it together in month three.

How do we find out if our idea is any good?

Cheaply, and before you fund the whole thing.

We do a short first pass where we work out which of the two paths fits, whether the idea survives the constraints, and what the riskiest part is. Then we build that riskiest part first and put it on actual glasses, so you are reacting to something real instead of a slide.

That is usually enough to tell you whether to keep going. Sometimes the answer is that your idea is a really good phone app and always was. We would rather tell you that in week one than take your money for twelve weeks and arrive at the same place.

The short version

Smart glasses are early. The store is not open, the audience is small, and the design constraints are tighter than almost anyone expects going in.

None of that makes it a bad bet. It makes it a specific one. If your idea needs hands free and eyes up, and you can afford to be ready before the market is, this is a genuinely good moment to start. If not, the honest advice is to keep an eye on it and spend your money somewhere with a shorter path to customers.

If you are not sure which of those you are, that is exactly the conversation we like having. Tell us the idea and we will tell you straight.