quest store

Meta Wants Android Play Store Apps Officially on Quest but Google “didn’t want to”

There are relatively few 2D Android apps available on the Quest Store, which seems odd since the Quest hardware runs a modified version of Android. According to Meta CTO Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth, Google simply isn’t interested in bringing the full Play Store of apps to Quest.

“There’s nothing preventing Android developers who have an APK running on Android phones today from bringing that into VR,” Bosworth said in a recent AMA via Instragram. “They just need to ship the APK to us, and maybe they need to do some light modification depending on how the control scheme would work, but not necessarily much after that.”

So much is clear when it comes to publishing the app directly to the Quest Store, which is the case for apps such as Peacock, Pluto TV, WhatsApp, and Instagram. But what about the millions of apps on Google’s official Play Store?

“We don’t have a way of automatically ingesting those [APKs],” Bosworth continues. “We would love for Google to bring their Play Store of apps to VR. We’ve asked them. They don’t want to do it, so it’s kind of up to the developers to do that.”

While Google’s Play Store is chock-full of useful, oftentimes free apps, what Bosworth doesn’t mention in his AMA are some of the complications that would naturally arise from having the Play Store on Quest. Not only could it open up a host of hypothetical issues with how revenue is split, but also how developers might choose to publish their apps.

For non-subscription-based apps, Google takes a 30% revenue cut from developers, while Meta does the same for both the Quest Store and App Lab. But why would Meta want Google sneaking away revenue, or vice versa? It seems doubtful that two such prominent digital storefronts could coexist on a single device.

There’s also the matter of the Samsung-Google-Qualcomm partnership we heard about earlier this year, which is set to bring an Android-powered XR headset to market, suggesting that Google hasn’t given up on headsets despite having completely shelved both its Daydream VR platform and AR glasses Project Iris.

Whatever the case, Quest headsets are fundamentally Android devices, so enterprising users can thankfully sideload APKs fairly easily via the ever-useful SideQuest software. Granted, the onus is on the user to source the APK in the first place, but with no other way to listen to Spotify while browsing the web without needing to tether to a computer, or using a Netflix app that’s actually updated, it’s thankfully feasible.

If you’re interested in giving it a go, check out our guide on How and Why to Sideload Games on Quest, which takes you step-by-step on the process of getting both 2D and VR-native apps on your Quest headset, but also (if it isn’t apparent by now) why you’d want to do it in the first place.

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Quest Store Revenue Reaches $2 Billion, But Momentum Has Slowed Over the Last Year

Coming alongside the big Quest 3 info dump today at Connect 2023, Meta revealed that Quest Store games and apps have generated over $2 billion in revenue. While the store is still earning for developers, looking at revenue over time shows that things have cooled off over the last year.

Meta’s Head of Developer Relations Melissa Brown announced the figure on stage, further noting that 100+ new and upgraded titles are coming to the Quest Store before the year’s end, more than half of which will be brand new games and apps.

While $2 billion sounds like an impressive number—it certainly is for the XR industry at large—it pales in comparison to what Meta regularly spends on its Reality Labs division.

Quest 2 next to Quest 3 | Image courtesy Meta

Back in July, the company reported a quarterly loss just south of $4 billion in Q2 2023; Reality Labs’ revenue was down by 39% due to lower Quest 2 sales, making for the worst quarterly performance in the past two years.

With today’s announcement, it’s also clear at what rate content sales have cooled off since Quest 2 was launched in 2020. The company announced at Connect 2022 in October last year that it had topped $1.5 billion in Quest Store revenue, accounting for everything since the first Quest’s launch in 2019, meaning it’s only managed to generate $500 million in the past 12 months, putting a clear end to any kind of take-off ramp that might have appeared to be forming.

Moving forward, this will undoubtedly put more weight on Quest 3 to fill in where Quest 2 left off, as stockholders will no doubt expect the $500 headset to meet or beat its forebear’s relatively meteoric success. Quest 3 pack in much of the functionality of the $1,000 Quest Pro headset, including color passthrough sensors for mixed reality, and has a significantly sleeker profile and more powerful chipset than the now $300 Quest 2.

Will that be enough for first-time VR users to jump in? Enough for Quest 2 users to upgrade? Whatever the case, Meta is undoubtedly subsidizing its XR hardware to make software sales more attractive. And if it doesn’t keep pumping out first-party titles like Asgard’s Wrath 2, they’ll need at least keep those multi-million-dollar success stories coming, like Gorilla Tag’s $26 million in revenue high-swinging success story, or the other 40 Quest games that Meta said had posted revenues over $10 million.

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Connect 2023 kicks off today, taking place September 27th and 28th at Meta’s Menlo Park headquarters. There’s been a ton of news already, so make sure to follow along by heading to our main page for all of the latest in Meta’s XR stuff.