Meta to Start Licensing Quest’s Horizon OS to Third-Party OEMs
Alex Heath, The Verge:
Meta has started licensing the operating system for its Quest
headset to other hardware makers, starting with Lenovo and
Asus. It’s also making a limited-run, gaming-focused Quest with
Xbox.
On the theme of opening up, Meta is also pushing for more ways to
discover alternative app stores. It’s making its experimental App
Lab store more prominent and even inviting Google to bring the
Play Store to its operating system, which is now called Horizon
OS. In a blog post, Meta additionally said that it’s
working on a spatial framework for developers to more easily port
their mobile apps to Horizon OS. […]
Zuckerberg has been clear that he wants his company to be a more
open platform than Apple’s. Here, he’s firmly positioning Meta’s
Horizon OS as the Android alternative to Apple’s Vision Pro. Given
how Android was more of a reaction to the iPhone, an analogy he’d
probably prefer is how Microsoft built the early PC market by
licensing Windows.
It definitely seems more like Windows than Android — there’s no word that Horizon OS is going open source. But we have an answer regarding what Zuckerberg meant when he positioned the Quest platform — now the Horizon OS platform, I suppose — as the “open” alternative to Apple’s VisionOS.
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Alex Heath, The Verge:
Meta has started licensing the operating system for its Quest
headset to other hardware makers, starting with Lenovo and
Asus. It’s also making a limited-run, gaming-focused Quest with
Xbox.
On the theme of opening up, Meta is also pushing for more ways to
discover alternative app stores. It’s making its experimental App
Lab store more prominent and even inviting Google to bring the
Play Store to its operating system, which is now called Horizon
OS. In a blog post, Meta additionally said that it’s
working on a spatial framework for developers to more easily port
their mobile apps to Horizon OS. […]
Zuckerberg has been clear that he wants his company to be a more
open platform than Apple’s. Here, he’s firmly positioning Meta’s
Horizon OS as the Android alternative to Apple’s Vision Pro. Given
how Android was more of a reaction to the iPhone, an analogy he’d
probably prefer is how Microsoft built the early PC market by
licensing Windows.
It definitely seems more like Windows than Android — there’s no word that Horizon OS is going open source. But we have an answer regarding what Zuckerberg meant when he positioned the Quest platform — now the Horizon OS platform, I suppose — as the “open” alternative to Apple’s VisionOS.