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Comment by tazjin | Hacker News Reader

You still have to deal with a complicated web of accounts and apps, converting your "Oculus" account to a "Horizon" account to unlink your Facebook from your Meta or whatever (who knows!).

I have a Quest (1 and 2 actually, though the 1 is in storage) and I basically never use it anymore because I just can *not* be bothered to try and log in through its various apps again and install software updates in broken UIs with no progress indication etc.

The only thing I use it for anymore is if somebody's over and wants to try VR, I let them to the tutorial demo and maybe play some Superhot (which hasn't broken for lack of updates ... yet!). Unfortunately streaming that to the TV via Chromecast from the app doesn't work anymore for Zuck knows what reason.

Consumer tech is so hostile and frustrating, I really just can not deal with it anymore. Sorry for the rant.

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> I have a Quest (1 and 2 actually, though the 1 is in storage) and I basically never use it anymore because I just can not be bothered to try and log in through its various apps again

Your knowledge and experience does not reflect current reality. Multiple logins haven't been required since the launch of the Quest 2. I didn't have a Quest 1, so I can't comment there.

> You still have to deal with a complicated web of accounts and apps

This is false. Only one account is needed. Sometimes individual apps will require a login, but that's exceedingly rare, or allows you to login with other devices, to the app, outside of the Quest ecosystem. This is not a fault of Meta, it's just the reality of third party credentials. I don't recall the last app I had to

If you buy a headset now, you would make a Meta account that would be used for everything. That's it.

If you had a Facebook account and are ok with continuing with the Facebook account, you're done.

If you had a Facebook account and you want to convert it to a Meta account, you can choose to do this, then you're done.

All three situations above use a single account for all apps, besides those that are meant to be accessible cross platform.

just the fact that a cascading number of if statements is needed is a sign that it's too complex lol

I disagree, since a single user would only experience a single if statement.

This is false. They evolve over time and you get pushed into various mandatory migration and linking/unlinking steps.

By the way, this kind of thing is in no way particular to Facebook - our entire industry has this much disrespect for its users.

With the current state, which appears to be stable (no more company acquisitions/name changes), they would experience one.

100% stable, all the way until the next company acquisition / name change / "An Update on Quest" / reorg. and so on.

This isn't some unique Meta or VR. These are growing pains of new tech. This is what happens with all new tech. We'll see dozens of companies grow, die, and be acquired, and dozens of products change hands and disappear. This is the MO for all new tech that all of us are intimately familiar with.

In this particular case, with this particular product and company, the churn has happened, and we should see some stability now.

If you want complete stability, you're in the wrong line of work, and definitely on the wrong website. But there's no reason to be irrational about it.

The next company acquisition? Who do you think is going to buy Meta?

I hate this kind of apologism.

"It's all very simple if you're an industry expert following $company's every move!"

There is no way to use all features of a Quest without logging in _at least_ twice (once on a phone, once on the device itself, because some features are inexplicably only accessible through the app). If you've had it for a while, you've also had to deal with (potentially non-exhaustive list):

- an Oculus account (comes (came?) in linked/unlinked flavours)

- a Facebook account

- a Meta account (is that the same as the above? who knows!)

- a Horizon account (what even is Horizon?)

From the perspective of somebody who just bought the damn thing to use it, as far as I can tell none of these were avoidable if you followed the default flows. There's probably more now. That's ignoring steps on the phone, and linking steps between devices through URLs needing to be opened on a computer and all of that faff.

I'm sure there's a secret code phrase I could've garnered from some Reddit with 10k users that, if I had said it to Support, would have let me skip one of these steps - but who does that?

Ironically this is exactly what they were trying to avoid by just requiring a Facebook account for everything

Maybe that is what they were trying to avoid but in practice they made it much worse. Oculus had accounts before they were bought by FB, it was pretty much like a Steam account for better or for worse. Then by the Quest 2 you had to use your Facebook account, which meant you had to verify your facebook account on your phone (maybe there was a work around, I didn't find it) and it asked for your phone number and then FB is texting you saying some robot with a woman's name just friended you, and you have this duummy account that is always posting what you are doing on the quest etc. etc.

Yeah I am sure there is a way to turn off all that junk and opt out of installing the app or giving them your phone number but its full of anti-patterns to make you do it. What a hassle.

You can't give them credit for solving a problem they created. If Nvidia made me log in to Facebook to use my graphics card, I wouldn't cheer when they gave me the option to make an Nvidia account instead.

I don't know if you realize the hilarity of this, but GeForce Experience (the only way to get auto-updates for Nvidia drivers) requires an Nvidia account, with options to login via Google, Facebook, et al

Kind of infuriating. But not as much as remembering to go and update my drivers... :\

Or, here’s an idea. They could just not require an ‘anything’ account at all. That’s how my PC works, and it’s fine.

I had to install three headsets from scratch today and you definitely only log in once.

There is only one account type now.

That's great, if your account type is already completely linked up, migrated, synced, logged in on your phone etc.

It was pretty simple for me to convert my Facebook account to a Meta only account. The first time I put on my headset after that change it asked if I wanted to unlink my facebook account and create a new account. I had to pick a new username and password, and re-enter my pairing code. But that was it. I was actually surprised it asked me.

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