[Update: Arrives] Galaxy S9 ARCore support delayed due to bug at Samsung's end

Update (May 15):

The much awaited AR Core support finally arrives for Galaxy S9/S9+.

Update (April 25):

Samsung expects the fix to be released in May.

This driver fix will probably get pushed with next month’s security update.

Original story:

Last month, a member of Google’s ARCore team confirmed that Samsung Galaxy S9’s support for the augmented reality platform will be arriving soon. It’s been over a month now, and the support hasn’t arrived yet.

A quick look at the discussion on the GitHub page of the ARCore Android SDK reveals the support has been delayed. The same member of the Google ARCore team recently revealed this, saying:

We encountered a driver issue that has delayed S9 support

The feature was supposed to be made available in version 1.1.0 release of the SDK, which arrived in the first week of April, but without the support. Google says a fix is in the works at Samsung’s end, and they are waiting for the fix to be available as part of an update.

Sadly, there’s currently no information on exactly when the fix will arrive. However, you can give the version 1.1 apk a try as Google says:

It’ll either work perfectly (if your specific firmware doesn’t have the driver bug) or never start tracking (if your firmware does have the bug)

At-least one user confirmed the apk worked for them. As for the bug details, here’s the information the company provided:

The issue relates to the behavior of the camera when image readers of different aspect ratios are attached to a capture session. ARCore uses a 16:9 1080p SurfaceTexture for display and a 4:3 480p ImageReader that needs to be full-sensor for motion tracking. On the S9 right now the 4:3 frame is getting cropped out of the 16:9 crop of the 4:3 sensor. Effectively it’s the opposite of SD video that’s pillarboxed into a 16:9 frame and then letterboxed back to a 4:3 frame. As a result (even with proper calibration) the motion tracking performance is unacceptable.

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