Meta CTO Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth says the company would “love” to have some sort of Discord integration in Quest in the future, pending interest from Discord, which once again underlines the fact that Quest really has only need Google Play.
Meta isn’t throwing its weight around to tempt Discord to support the Quest platform, though that’s probably just as true of a ton of services currently missing from Meta’s XR app store. Quest’s official store doesn’t have Spotify, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, TikTok, any VPN service, or any of the myriad of mobile apps and games you can download right now on a $50 Android phone.
Granted, you can load those things into Quest with the help of SideQuest and the app-specific apk file, or run multiple services in a web browser. However, this is a far cry from having them as officially integrated services that you can simply download from the Apple-like store with Vision Pro, which, in addition to several major competitors, supports millions of iOS applications.
In Bosworth’s recent Instagram AMA, he calls the issue “one of those things where, if you have friends and family on the Discord team, reach out and encourage them to consider it.” Putting this into perspective: the trillion-dollar company hopes it can convince Discord by making youask your cousin Rayray who works there.
“I’m sure everyone there has left to do integrations with them. If their product leadership is getting contact from customers, saying “hey, this is something I want,” hopefully that tips the scales in the direction of [supporting Quest],” says Bosworth. “But in the meantime the platform is open, the invitation is open. We would love to have them. I think it’s a great product and it would be a great fit for our two communities to come together.”
Keeping hope for the specific interests of developers has been at the core of Meta modus operandisince the release of the Samsung Gear VR in 2015, an ongoing side effect of being unable to tempt Google to bring the Play Store to its Android-based VR headset.
Bosworth says that Google and Meta held talks in 2023, but in the end it was Google that walked away from the table. Now, months after those talks took place, Meta has apparently given up all hope of getting the app support that only Google can provide. Here’s what Bosworth said in March:
They can bring the Play Store (with its current economy for 2d apps) and add value to all their developers at once, which is exactly the kind of open app ecosystem we want to see. We would be delighted to have them. It would be a win for their developers and all consumers and good to keep pushing for it.
Instead, they want us to agree to restrictive terms that require us to give up our freedom to innovate and build better experiences for people, and developers have seen this game before, and we think we can let’s do better this time.
Whatever the case, Google may have its reasons why it can’t (or won’t) bring its millions of mobile apps to the fast-approaching Meta family of devices. It may be preparing to compete with the help of Samsung. Maybe. We still haven’t heard anything about that device, or whether Google is actually putting real skin in the game by releasing a full Android XR OS suitable for launch on other handsets, so we don’t you know what will happen.
Meanwhile, Meta seems to be searching outside of Google Google first releasing its XR operating system to third-party OEMs, which will initially include ASUS, Lenovo and Xbox. However, it remains to be seen whether Meta can attract that critical mass of Android developers in time to compete with Apple once it finally releases its second (hopefully cheaper) iteration of Vision Pro. To do this, Meta needs to sell LOTof XR headsets that use their Horizon system (formerly Quest OS) to get the developer’s eyes looking in the right place.
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