A usable AR SDK has been available from Qualcomm/Vuforia for years on more devices than ARKit supports. The only thing that came out of it was marketing gimmicks.

I thought vuforia was mostly just a marker based AR, which never really took off in the US market. ARKit is markerless and their VIO system is actually pretty good.

ARKits ease of use and is way ahead of vuforia. The advantage of ARKit is also OS integrated.

yep - have been using Vuforia since it came out. Fantastic for scanning in models and the usability is great. That said, I keep coming back to the fact that the install base of iOS11 is what intrigues me the most. By no means is ARkit the magic bullet, but its enough and it can tempt developers the same.

Does it have Ocr built in?

I wouldn't hold my breath on it. Real-world OCR is hard. According to my tests, even Microsoft, Google or IBM's APIs get it wrong very, very often.

not that I've seen, though with some logical combination of object dimensions, env variables (depth of field, etc), and a decent image recognition/ML then you could probably get decent OCR. Note that this is for visual recognition, feel text is decently solved (exhibitA, Google Translate).