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10 best augmented reality games (AR games) for Android

Augmented reality gaming is still a new concept, but there are some decent games. Here are the best AR games for Android!

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Published onFebruary 5, 2024

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Augmented Reality (AR) can be a fun technology to play with. The basic premise of AR is to overlay digital content on top of real things using something like a map, a camera, or sometimes the sky. Unlike VR, it grew slowly in the background over many years. There aren’t a ton of huge, great AR products yet, but the list grows slowly every year. AR has tons of potential applications and it’s only a matter of time before they become more rampant. Here are the best AR apps for Android

The best-augmented reality apps for Android

Assemblr Studio
Google Maps
Google Translate
Halo AR
Vuforia View

Zenni Optical
Sky Map
Snapchat
AR Ruler App: Tape Measure Cam
TikTok

Assemblr Studio

Price: Free

Assemblr Studio is a great place to jump in if you are new to AR. A wealth of pre-made templates from all facets, including printing, marketing, and presentation allow you to test what the app has to offer to your heart’s content. After that, you can advance to creating your own AR products. The build option in the app allows you to create unique scenes with pre-built and custom creations.

Google Maps

Price: Free

Google Maps is one of the best uses of AR in an app so far. The app recently added Live View, a way to navigate with your camera viewfinder from the app. Maps then impose information on the screen about businesses and directions as you walk or move down the road. It’s a super neat concept and excellent for directions in cities where you may not know all the street names. Plus, we can see this technology improving over time to work even better than it does now.

Google Translate

Price: Free

Google Translate is arguably the best translator app out there. It supports a ton of languages. You can translate back and forth between virtually any of them. You can even have it translated in real-time so you can have conversations with people. The augmented reality part of the app lets you point your camera at text from another language. The app then translates it in real-time. This can help you do things like read street signs or menus. Like the barcode scanner above, this is one of those super handy AR apps that a lot of people install. Microsoft Translator has a lot of the same features as well.

Halo AR

Price: Free

Halo AR is one of the most powerful apps on this list. You can use it to create overlays on objects in your environment, be it videos, images, audio files, text, or even 3D models. And it’s also very simple and intuitive to use. All you have to do is tap on the Create button, scan the object you want to create an overlay on, and then select the item to overlay. And voila! The next time your phone camera is pointed toward the object, the overlay should seamlessly appear.

Vuforia View

Price: Free

The Vuforia View app is also a pretty functional AR app you can use to view models in your surroundings. But what makes it stand out, is the fact that you can have unique insights into the models. The first model you can interact with within the app is a motorcycle. You can zoom in and out, and even view the internals of the vehicle. Other experiences include a collapsed and exploded view of a missile, helicopter, or industry sealing machine.

Zenni Optical

Price: Free

Zenni Optical is more of a shopping companion app, allowing you to try on AR versions of spectacles overlayed on your face. The plethora of options available makes this app a must-have, with not just a variety of frames, but also color variants. The setup is fairly quick and easy. The first time you boot it up, it will scan your face using multiple angles. This is so it can overlay the glasses you try on even if you move your head around.

Sky Map

Price: Free

Sky Map is one of the oldest AR apps out there. It was originally developed by Google. You turn it on and the phone displays a star map. You hold your phone up to the sky. The display will show the stars in the sky right above it. You can use it to find constellations. It’s a little tough to calibrate at first, but it’s reasonably accurate once you figure it out. It’s fun for entertainment, especially when you’re enjoying the gears. It’s free with no in-app purchases.

Snapchat

Price: Free

Snapchat is one of the most popular messaging platforms out there. You connect with a person on the app and then you can send pictures and videos of whatever you’re doing. The app has a variety of special filters that you can augment right on top of your face. It can look like you’re a dog or a cat or whatever else Snapchat happens to have available on any given day. It’s some really basic augmented reality, but it works shockingly well. The app is a battery hog and not overly optimized. However, it’s still fun to use.

AR Ruler App: Tape Measure Cam

Price: Free

The AR Ruler app does exactly what its name suggests. It measures various objects you point your phone’s camera at using AR. The parameters you can measure are impressive, including height, length, distance between two objects, and angles between two surfaces. It’s extremely user-friendly. All you have to do is open the app, select the parameter you want to measure, point your camera at the two reference points, and tap on them. The results should be displayed as an overlay.

TikTok

Price: Free

TikTok is on this list for the same reason Facebook and Snapchat are. The company has an augmented reality platform where developers can build out AR experiences for users to play with. The news was announced in August 2021 so there aren’t a ton of examples at the time of this writing. However, as the platform expands, more and more AR effects should become available in the TikTok Effect Studio for creators. Social media has long been one of the biggest driving forces for AR and I guess TikTok is contributing to that. Given what we’ve seen from Facebook and Snapchat, the results could be very interesting.

If we missed any great augmented reality apps for Android, tell us about them in the comments! You can also click here to check out our latest Android app and game lists!