'Pivot to software' has been done several times in computing history: Go Corporation, SGI, Sun, Blackberry, Palm, Sega, and oh, NeXT. These are interesting precedents. I don't know of a 'pivot to software' that actually worked (NeXT ended up going back to hardware, thanks to the reverse acquisition!)
There's also the question of the licensees: so they choose Meta’s OS as the base for their hardware, maybe because they don't have anything else? Quest OS is neither a best in class user experience (it's still full of bugs, frictions and is a very inconsistent UI), and it's clearly not a good dev experience at all.
So your hardware now inherit all of Meta's tech and UX debts, and you don't even have a guarantee of daily recurring usage or of a killer application user will flock to.
Is that the great win for their hardware that they think it is?
Of course, as several of us predicted when the number of Vision Pro apps quickly surpassed Quest Store Apps, Meta is now forced to react and change their weird two-tier approach: they are opening a (small) marketing presence for App Lab apps and are creating a "brand new" spatial app framework, to start and get out of the Unity/Unreal game engine third-party pipeline trap.
That they only now see that giving developers a native app UI kit is a basic of any OS is… not promising from a supposedly now long term OS owner.
The 'pivot to software' is more like a pivot back to software because Meta already disbanded a previous OS team at Reality Labs and indeed platform software was exactly what motivated the thinking behind buying Oculus as expressed in Zucks internal deal memo on the subject [1] where he ranks Apps and Platform OS (eg Android/PlayStore) both above hardware. They also recently passed on an offer from Google who are working on a new XR android build. 6DOF 3D is a unique surface area and so far all we have seen are OS ports from 2D pancake land so these efforts can't come soon enough.
Promoting App Lab apps was the most exciting part of this announcement.
I had been put off porting anything to Quest since I'd need to get official Meta blessing to actually get store presence to have enough users to pay for such an effort, but now if you can publish in App Lab and actually get some in-store promotion, it starts to sound way more compelling.
I do agree with their initial approach to keep the perceived quality of the first apps high. But reality is that people want to play what they find fun/funny, even if less polished, and this change might open up some store promotion for such apps that solo devs like me are more likely to be able to make.
There's also the question of the licensees: so they choose Meta’s OS as the base for their hardware, maybe because they don't have anything else? Quest OS is neither a best in class user experience (it's still full of bugs, frictions and is a very inconsistent UI), and it's clearly not a good dev experience at all.
So your hardware now inherit all of Meta's tech and UX debts, and you don't even have a guarantee of daily recurring usage or of a killer application user will flock to. Is that the great win for their hardware that they think it is?
Of course, as several of us predicted when the number of Vision Pro apps quickly surpassed Quest Store Apps, Meta is now forced to react and change their weird two-tier approach: they are opening a (small) marketing presence for App Lab apps and are creating a "brand new" spatial app framework, to start and get out of the Unity/Unreal game engine third-party pipeline trap.
That they only now see that giving developers a native app UI kit is a basic of any OS is… not promising from a supposedly now long term OS owner.