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Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Meta is starting to license HorizonOS to other companies.

They still have the problem of no Google Playstore apps. And it doesn't look like Google and Meta are coming to an agreement anytime soon

I have been using Quest for the past 3 years. Not once did I miss anything from the Play Store (as a daily Android user). You can go to Quest subreddit or other VR forums and find that most people think the same as me.

And that is exactly what Meta wanted. They don't want to rely on Play Store, and they managed to ship tens of millions of devices without it.

In an AMA last year Bosworth said that they offered Google to have flat apps on the Quest but they wanted to limit it to that and not allow VR apps AFAIK ( they are making the money with the VR apps, so they most likely won't give that market away ) and Google wasn't interested.

For gaming it's not an issue but if they ever want to sell people on the idea of it being used for productivity, that flat android app market would be a big factor. They have recently started their own toolkit to build/convert regular android apps to HorizonOS so they maybe hope to beat Google at their own game, but we'll see how that turns out

My hot take: productivity on VR is not and will never be a thing, at least in the current heavy, bulky form. There won't be more than a few hardcore enthusiasts who can make use of it. It is made up by Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook.

VR and watching videos, on the other hand, are real use cases, just like how people are using them today.

I don't really disagree, although I did try out the GodotEngine editor on the Quest with just a small bluetooth keyboard [1] and that experience was actually more than just acceptable. Full disclaimer, I have not repeated that since because I haven't felt the urge to.

But where productivity really makes sense are the pure glasses ( like XREAL One, Viture, etc. ). Ever since I tried those I do want that much more than productivity in a headset.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SEuCKIMZN9g

Have they really sold tens of millions of devices? That's better than I thought it was doing.

Current estimates are around 30M but I think that was before this Christmas period

That is far more than I expected. Although my mental model for VR is that Community episode[0], which is perhaps not a great benchmark.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawnmower_Maintenance_and_Post...

They really do want play store and offered them zero fees. But it would be a limited one that couldn't sell full VR apps, mostly bring 2d and 2d with system rendered 3d elements to their platform, and meta keeping the rest to themselves.

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