Android XR at work: what you can keep on your side

A company has spent three years getting its IT into its own hands. One directory for every account, documents in a store it controls, an AI assistant that runs against its own data with a log of what it was asked. Then the first smart glasses arrive for a pilot. They run Android XR, the assistant is Gemini, apps come from Google Play, and on the audio glasses the agent completes multi-step tasks on the phone in the background. Nobody decided to hand a new vendor the most personal interface the company has ever used. It just came with the device.

That is not a reason to refuse the glasses. It is a reason to know which parts are the platform’s and which parts can stay yours, before the pilot becomes the standard.

What Android XR is

Android XR is Google’s platform for XR devices: headsets, glasses with displays and audio glasses, with Gemini as the assistant layer, developed with Samsung and Qualcomm. The first device was Samsung’s Galaxy XR headset in October 2025. At Google I/O in May 2026 Google showed smart glasses with Samsung and Qualcomm, with frames from Warby Parker and Gentle Monster among others; the audio glasses work with Android and iOS phones and act as the agent’s voice and camera. Samsung has announced its own Gemini glasses for November 2026. The first priced display glasses on the platform are XREAL Aura, from USD 1,279; what bringing them into a fleet involves is in XREAL Aura is a new device class in your fleet.

The real cause: the assistant is part of the operating system

On a laptop, the AI assistant is an application you choose, and you can choose another. On Android XR, the assistant is a layer of the platform itself. Many devices, many frame brands, one platform and one default assistant. How much of the agent’s work runs on the device, on the phone or in the cloud is not publicly documented, so the honest starting point is to assume the vendor’s services are involved until you know otherwise.

Where the dependence sits

Accounts. The assistant and the app store come with the platform vendor’s account. If that account is personal, the company has no say over what is stored in it. If it is a company account, it is one more identity outside your directory unless it is tied back to it, and identity is the real lock-in.

The assistant’s memory. What the agent saw, heard and did on someone’s behalf lives wherever the assistant keeps its history. Ask where that is, who can read it and how it is deleted.

Distribution. Apps reach the glasses through the platform’s store and its rules. Your own internal apps need a way onto the device that does not depend on a consumer storefront.

The camera stream. An agent that understands what the wearer is looking at needs images. Whatever leaves the device leaves under the vendor’s terms, and EU data protection rules still apply to everyone in the frame.

Hardware choice that is not platform choice. Several manufacturers and frame brands can feel like choice. They all sit on the same platform, so switching hardware does not move you off it.

What you can keep on your side

Identity. Company accounts only, provisioned and removed from your own directory, with single sign-on into your own applications. The person leaving should take nothing with them and leave nothing behind.

Your own apps and your own logic. The Android XR SDK lets you build for the glasses yourself. With Jetpack Projected the app runs on a host device, such as a company-managed phone, and projects to the glasses, so the code that touches company data sits on a device you manage. Jetpack Compose Glimmer is the interface toolkit for see-through displays.

Your own AI for company data. Questions about customers, contracts or internal procedures can go to an assistant that runs against your own data, with your own log, rather than to the platform’s general one. That is the idea behind an AI-native workplace you own, and the reason we would treat the platform assistant as one tool among several, not the place company knowledge lives.

Recordings and logs. If images or transcripts are kept at all, they are kept in storage you control, with a retention period someone has written down.

The exit plan

Write it before the pilot, while it is cheap. List what would sit with the vendor after six months: accounts, assistant history, app data, settings, recordings. Next to each, write how you would get it out and how you would delete it. Keep anything that matters in your own systems, and make the glasses a thin client to them. Then a change of platform, or a change in the vendor’s terms, means replacing a screen, not migrating a company. It is the same discipline as pricing any exit, and most companies find out nobody can price the exit only when they need one.

A test you can run today

Before any hardware is sold in Europe, a developer can try the glasses emulator in the Android XR SDK. Ask for one small, read-only internal app, such as today’s service jobs for a technician, served from your own systems through a company-managed phone.

Then do the paper half: for that app, list every account it needs, every service it calls and every piece of data it stores. Mark each line as yours or the vendor’s. The lines marked “vendor” are your dependence; the lines you cannot fill in are your first questions.