Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
Meta took 68.7% of head-worn shipments in a quarter dominated by glasses without displays
IDC's second-quarter figures put display-less audio glasses at 70.3% of head-worn shipments and Meta at roughly nineteen times the share of its nearest rival, while the products that could supply a second platform are still unlaunched.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Shipments of XR headsets and glasses grew 35.3% year over year in the second quarter of 2026, down from 130.2% growth in the prior quarter, which IDC puts down to tougher comparisons and a gap between product cycles.
- Audio glasses, the display-less category that includes Ray-Ban Meta, took 70.3% of shipments, up from 61.9% a year earlier, with display glasses at 14.3% and headsets at 15.4%.
- Meta held 68.7% share, adding prescription eyewear through its Blayzer and Scriber Optics lines plus cheaper models that skip the fashion branding EssilorLuxottica normally supplies.
- RayNeo ranked second at 3.6% share after growing 83.3% year over year, and Alibaba came third at 2.6% on the back of Qwen and its existing position in China.
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Why it matters
- constraint A team specifying an app or a fleet for the installed base is specifying voice, camera and an assistant; a design that assumes a screen in front of the eye is aiming at 14.3% of shipments.
- decision Buyers choose between standardising on the one vendor with volume today and waiting on Android XR hardware whose ship dates and prices are not yet set.
- exposure The people newly exposed are bystanders: colleagues, visitors and customers in range of a recording device that looks like eyewear, and the employer who admitted it.
- precedent If a second platform does emerge from these launches it will be Google's, arriving inside Samsung's and XREAL's frames. Procurement would then have two assistants to pick from.
Meta's 68.7% is about nineteen times RayNeo's 3.6%, the second-largest share IDC recorded in the quarter [8][11][21]. Add Alibaba's 2.6% and the top three account for 74.9% of shipments, leaving 25.1% for XREAL, Xiaomi and everyone else [12][22]. Xiaomi's share nearly halved year over year as competition in its home market intensified, according to IDC [13].
The mix moved further than the total did. Audio glasses went from 61.9% of shipments to 70.3%, display glasses from 11% to 14.3%, and headsets, which by subtraction held 27.1% a year ago, fell to 15.4% [4][6][7][23]. The 8.4 points audio glasses gained plus the 3.3 points display glasses gained equal the 11.7 points headsets lost [24].
That mix limits what Meta's lead can be made of. Display glasses and headsets together are 29.7% of all shipments, so even if every one of them were Meta's, at least 39 points of its 68.7% would have to be audio glasses [25]. Most of Meta's volume sits in a device with no screen [5].
Growth of 35.3% in the quarter is down from 130.2% the quarter before [1][2]. IDC attributes the deceleration to tougher comparisons and a pause between product cycles, and forecasts unit growth of 26.3% this year, 40.5% in 2027 and 26.4% in 2028 [3][18]. Compounded, that is roughly 2.24 times the units by the end of 2028 [26]. The hardware decision can wait a quarter. The camera policy starts with the first pair an employee brings to work.
The challengers IDC lists all arrive in the remaining months of 2026. Snap's Specs bring AR in a consumer-friendly design with a fashion-led marketing campaign [14]. XREAL's Aura pairs its personal-theater hardware with Google's Android XR, and Samsung's audio glasses pair Gemini with the distribution of Gentle Monster and Warby Parker [15][16]. Two of the three run Google's stack, so the credible second platform is Google's, sold inside other companies' frames. IDC wrote that Meta's lead also rests on distribution scale, brand recognition and AI features, "advantages that are harder for challengers to replicate than any single hardware launch" [10].
On privacy, IDC notes a recent backlash over always-on recording and says not all of the attention glasses are getting is flattering; the post refers to growing concerns it has tracked. IDC does not name the products or size the reaction [19][28]. The enterprise demand it does describe sits in training and design, where it has tracked ROI gains in early pilots [20].
What to watch
- Whether Meta's Connect event delivers the lower-priced display glasses IDC anticipates, and in what volume.
- Third-quarter share for Snap's Specs and Samsung's Gemini audio glasses, the first measurable read on whether a second platform exists.
- Whether IDC holds its 40.5% growth forecast for 2027 once the launch wave has landed.