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Comment by arnaudsm | Hacker News Reader

Reminder : there's still a $10k bounty for rooting the Quest.

Thousands of enthusiasts are waiting for it, opening this platform could create an huge homebrew scene, and free us from Facebook. If you're into Android reverse engineering, please give it a shot.

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Context:

> The day after Oculus started shipping the Quest 2 VR headset, Robert Long, a developer at Mozilla who's not a fan of Facebook's policies, put up a $5,000 bounty for a proven jailbreak for the headset. Palmer Luckey, the ousted founder of Oculus, matched that offer, bringing the prize to $10,000 for a verified root access jailbreak.

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/76208/the-bounty-for-quest-2-...

If it didn’t require facebook to run I’d absolutely buy one, I don’t have a FB account and the last time I tried to sign up they wanted my govt ID to verify an account which I’m not comfortable with

>If it didn’t require facebook to run I’d absolutely buy one

I don't have an Oculus Quest 2 but have heard good things about it. But I can't get one because my Facebook account was shut down without explanation in 2019. Despite its age (15 years) I barely used it, let alone for anything "controversial", but did regularly log into it. I repeatedly tried to verify my identity by submitting an image of my driver's license, without any response.

If a Facebook employee is reading this ... I don't want to create a fake new Facebook account (which would be against the TOS, anyway). I want my own back.

I mean, you can already create homebrew apps. Like, it's pretty much like any Android device. Just use adb to add any .apk you'd like.

This is not what rooting means, you can install .apk on every Android phone but not every can be rooted.

At the moment Quest 2 cannot be used without FB account, root access would allow installing modified firmware without that requirement as well as creating 3rd party application stores browsable on device itself.

I know what rooting means, and I'd kindly ask that you read a comment before replying to it. I was stating that you can already make homebrew apps, and you can already use third-party, on-device app stores. I didn't say it was already rootable.

Further, you can also use a Quest 2 without a Facebook account. I do, myself. It's pretty well-documented.

Can you do it without a legacy occulus account too?

Yes, you can.

I know this thread is 4 days old, but in the interest of utility if you search up "bypass oculus quest facebook ADB" you can find some handy guides to skipping the facebook login requirement to allow running sideloaded apps only.

The device has not yet been rooted though, so the bounty hasn't paid out.

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