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My intuition based on previous Facebook-based business is that depending on anything by Meta makes for a very risky proposition - it might be doing great at any one moment and be completely shut down or just made non-viable the next.

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This is not really true? The Oculus Quest lets you sideload whatever apps you want. If Facebook spurns you and deletes all your dev account data, you can still build, deploy, test, sell and distribute your app or game without them.

If Apple's headset looks anything like their phones, it will probably be the more fragile platform to depend on.

Sideloading an app is not a sustainable way to distribute a commercial app. It's even more fragile than the official route, and it's a lot to ask of an end user, not to mention the sketchy feel to it.

Tell that to the hundreds of developers using sideloading to distribute thousands of successful apps on Quest: https://sidequestvr.com/

Or to the thousands of Mac developers who sideload their app without the App Store.

Or to the tens of thousands of Windows developers who distribute apps through freestanding MSI and EXE files...

This is what I was afraid to hear, thanks for sharing this. My guess is that if you want to build on their platform, you’ll have to kiss the ring of social networking, which is something I’m not too interested in.

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