February 21, 2024

#1350: Healium Developer Challenges Meta’s Open Ecosystem Claims Being Stuck in App Lab for 3 Years While Launching on Day One for Apple Vision Pro

1 hour 2 minutes

Last Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a review of the Apple Vision Pro on his Instagram page where at the end he made the claim that Meta intends on being a much more open platform and ecosystem than Apple. While Meta has pushed forward standards like OpenXR and has an industry-leading implementation of WebXR, their curation strategy on the Quest store has been highly curated and much more similar to a closed, walled garden strategy of a gaming console. According to my informal count, Meta has only launched around 620 official Quest apps in 4.7 years since the Quest launched in May 2019, while the Apple Vision Pro already has over 1000 apps launched after 11 days.

Sarah Hill was able to launch the Apple Vision Pro version of her Healium app onto the Apple Store on day 1 while they've been relegated to Meta's App Lab for over 3 years now with no hope to ever be promoted. App Lab was originally inspired by the success of SideQuest, which was an third-party method for apps that were rejected from Meta's official store to be side loaded onto a Quest device. But Meta launched their own alternative store competitor of App Lab in February 2021 and slowly made SideQuest harder and harder to use. Being App Lab is still not the same on being on the main store as Meta makes it much harder for consumers to organically search and discover her app. Despite all of the traction that Healium has found with enterprise customers, they still have not been promoted to the main Quest store. Given Hill's experiences with both Meta and Apple, then she does not buy Zuckerberg's claims that Meta will somehow prove to be the more open of a platform.

I wanted to touch base with Hill to have her elaborate on her experiences with both ecosystems, and how she's been able to continue to thrive in delivering mediation experiences with biometric data integrations with different watches and EEG sensors by finding enterprise customers, integrating with other headsets, and making the most of their constrained access to the Quest ecosystem despite all of the disadvantages of being stuck on App Lab.

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