We are happy to announce that Layar is back in the App Store and available for the iPhone 3GS. The new Layar Reality Browser has a re-engineered engine under the hood. This new engine makes the application light, stable and very quick. It is ready to handle all the current layers and it is a good base to realize all of our exciting future plans.

The new Layar Reality Browser now also comes with language support for French, German, Dutch and Italian. Other languages will follow in future releases.

So what are you waiting for? Download the new Layar Reality Browser now and experience one of the almost 400 layers.

Let us know what you think. Happy layering!

P.S. Like the new logo? ;-)

We are very proud to announce that we are pre-installed on the Samsung Galaxy Portal in the UK.

Maarten Lens-FitzGerald, co-founder, Layar: “Layar is honoured to have Samsung, the worldwide #2 mobile manufacturer install the Layar browser on the home screen of this leading device. The UK is now primed to become one of the most active markets in the exciting new world of Mobile Augmented Reality. Samsung’s distribution of the Layar platform will provide developers with a compelling channel to reach an even larger audience of AR users”

For this pre-installation Samsung has created their own Layars which will be embedded into the Galaxy Portal at launch – The Samsung Hotel Search, powered by hotels.com, Samsung Local Search, powered by Qype, Samsung Train Station Search powered by thetrainline.com and the Samsung Football Pub Finder.

• Lastminute.com (*Exclusive) – restaurant finder, guide and booking services


• Nestoria Property Search (*Exclusive) – nationwide coverage with over 800,000 properties available to be viewed at any one time


• Trainline.com (Launch partner) – find directions to your nearest train station across the country


• Barclaycard (Launch partner) – find local Barclaycard cash points and shops participating in the contactless pay scheme


• Samsung Local Search, powered by Qype.com – millions of reviews across the country available, from the best shops to restaurants, cafes, theatres, museums, gigs and much more


• Samsung Hotel Search, powered by Hotels.com – guide and to nearby hotels in the area


• Samsung Football Pub Finder – a massive database of pub around the country, and those that have TV capable of showing the live match! This is a Samsung Layer made available to any handset.

“This marks our first entry into the exciting world of Augmented Reality. We expect to see a lot of growth in this area in the near future.”

The Samsung Galaxy Portal will be available in the UK stores as of next Monday.

We take great pride in our product and are very serious about delivering high quality to our users and our developer community.

This is why we decided, ourselves and not Apple, to pull our application from the Appstore after the number of users reporting crashes exceeded our own quality standards.

We are currently re-engineering the app and we are aiming for resubmission to the Appstore by the end of February.

So please be patient and we are pretty sure we won’t disappoint you again.

Yesterday Layar v3 was published in the App Store. After a flood of complaints that the app crashes for many users, we’ve decided to remove the app from the store. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

We had issues already since the very first launch of the iPhone app. Unfortunately these issues were due to bad memory management decisions right from the start, something that we could not easily fix without completely re-engineering the app. There is some old code in there that is buggy and we don’t know exactly where the bug is. Since the app worked fine for 80% of the users (and on all our testing devices), we decided to move on to v3 before we would rebuild the framework of our app. We’ve tested v3 thoroughly internally and did not have any issues with crashes when submitting to the App Store. In fact, we still cannot reproduce the crashes that many of our users are reporting right now.

The percentage of users with crashes has grown too much with the launch of v3 to justify keeping the app online. We don’t want our users to be confronted with an app that is unusable due to systematic crashes. We take great pride in our product and are very serious about delivering high quality to our users and our developer community. We’ve already started re-engeneering the app, but this won’t be finished in a matter of days, rather a matter of weeks.

Our sincere apologies to our developers who put a lot of effort into making great content for Layar v3 that can now only be viewed on Android. We are proud of the layers you made and we will put all our efforts into making them available on the iPhone as soon as possible.

Dirk Groten
CTO Layar