Unity's strategy: AR Kit Plugin vs. AR Foundation?

At the moment, Unity supports (at least) three different approaches to AR:

• ARKit Plugin, for native low-level support for the latest ARKit features
• AR Foundation, which has its own ARKit XR and ARCore XR Plugins, but only supports sub-set of the ARKit Plugin at the moment (no image tracking, no world mapping)
• Vuforia

I am wondering what the long-termin strategy of Unity is, especially with respect to AR Kit Plugin vs. AR Foundation. Will the low-level AR Kit Plugin be supported in the future, or will everything move to AR Foundation? As far as I can tell, the ARKit XR Plugin is different from the AR Kit Plugin. But I'm not 100% sure about this.

Is it "safe" to develop an AR app based on the AR Kit Plugin now and transition to AR Foundation later?

 

This GDC video seems to address the direction that Unity is moving in regarding AR.

In short it sounds like they are encouraging the AR Foundation structure. It would be nice if the rate of feature development could synchronize between Unity, Google and Apple.

 

The ARKit plugin is now gone from the unity asset store, why is this? as its still available via bitbucket. will it be still supported in the future or is it to encourage people to use AR Foundation? Vuforia was also mentioned in a unity mail out today.

 

I have a similar concern, banking on AR foundation now. Does it support ARKit2.0?

 

Hey
I think its just that ARKit is provided as a package now, as per the video linked above. And ARFoundation is optional as an interface to same...