Meta opens up Horizon OS to third-party device makers, escalating battle with Apple

Meta is opening up Meta Horizon OS as the race to dominate the next frontier of computing heats up.

Facebook parent Meta on April 22 said it is opening up Meta Horizon OS, the operating system powering its Meta Quest mixed reality headsets, to third-party hardware makers.

This move comes as the social networking giant clashes with Apple to dominate the next frontier of computing. The strategy resembles how Google had earlier opened up its Android operating system to take on Apple's iOS in the battle for smartphone operating systems.

"In every era of computing, there are open and closed models" said Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg in a video clip on Instagram.

"With phones, Apple's closed model basically won out. Phones are tightly controlled and you are locked into what they will let you do. It doesn't have to be that way. In the PC era, the open model won out, you could do a lot more things, install mods, more diversity of hardware, software and more" the Meta chief said.

With this measure, Zuckerberg said that their goal is that "the open model defines the next generation of computing again, with the metaverse, glasses and headsets "

Over the years, the company has spent tens of billions of dollars on its metaverse ambitions and even changed its corporate name from Facebook to Meta, as the social networking giant stakes claim to shape the nascent technology.

In June 2023, Apple released its first mixed reality headset, Vision Pro, which competes with Meta's much-cheaper Quest headsets.

Read: Mark Zuckerberg says Quest 3 is a 'better product' than Apple's Vision Pro. Here's why

Meta has roped in device makers Lenovo, Microsoft and Asus's Republic of Gamers (ROG) as its first set of partners who will be building devices based on Meta Horizon OS. Lenovo will develop mixed reality devices for productivity, learning, and entertainment purposes, while Asus ROG will develop a performance gaming headset.

Microsoft's Xbox is teaming up with Meta to create a limited-edition Meta Quest, inspired by Xbox. Last year, Xbox had teamed up with Meta to bring its cloud gaming service Xbox Cloud Gaming to Meta Quest, allowing people to play Xbox games on a large 2D virtual screen in mixed reality.

Microsoft, a long term partner to Meta, also introduced office productivity apps such as Word, Excel, and Powerpoint to Meta Quest devices in December 2023, with plans to also bring in other apps such as Outlook, Teams, SharePoint onto the platform in the future.

All these devices will be powered by Qualcomm's Snapdragon processors, which Meta says is tightly integrated with its software and hardware stacks.

In a post on Threads platform, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said more open ecosystems are a "win for everyone"

"People get more headsets to choose from, developers get a bigger pool of compatible hardware to build for. And if you want to build the most social platform, which we do, then it needs to be accessible to as many people as possible" he said.

He mentioned that Meta itself has benefited from open systems, with Meta Horizon OS beginning on the mobile-first foundations of the Android Open Source Project about a decade ago.

"Our deep investments in augmented reality/mixed reality (AR/MR) and research have enabled us to produce a full-fledged MR operating system now used by millions of people," Bosworth said.

Read: Meta heats up the AI chatbot race with new assistant powered by Llama 3

Meta said that Horizon OS combines the core technologies that power today’s mixed reality experiences along with a suite of features that put social presence at the centre of the platform.

Developers and creators will be able to take advantage of various technologies built by Meta such as Inside-out body tracking, that lets headsets track user's wrist, elbows, shoulder, and torso, and self-tracked controllers, that provides users a full 360-degree range of motion in its headsets.

It also includes other technologies such as hand, eye, face and body tracking to facilitate more natural interaction systems and social presence.

"For mixed reality, we built a full stack of technologies for blending the digital and physical worlds, including high-resolution Passthrough, Scene Understanding and Spatial Anchors" the social networking firm said in a blogpost.

Meta is rebranding the Meta Quest Store, its digital marketplace for Quest headsets, to the Meta Horizon Store and is expanding ways developers can reach consumers. The Meta Quest mobile companion app is also being renamed as Meta Horizon app.

Developers will be able to use popular tools they already use to bring their mobile apps to Meta Horizon OS or to create entirely new mixed reality apps. The company is also developing a new spatial app framework that will help mobile developers create mixed reality experiences.

In addition, Meta is starting the process of removing the boundaries between the Meta Horizon Store and App Lab, which currently lets any developer who meets basic technical and content requirements release software on the platform.

App Lab titles will soon be featured in a dedicated section of the store on all its devices, making them easy for larger audiences to discover, it said.

"The social layer of Meta Horizon OS means people’s identities, avatars, social graphs and friend groups can move with them across virtual spaces, and developers can integrate these social features into their apps. Because this social layer is made to bridge multiple platforms, people can spend time together in virtual spaces that exist across mixed reality, mobile and desktop devices" it said.

Apart from this, consumers will also be able to access content from other services such as Microsoft's Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and Valve's Steam Link, besides Air Link system that lets people wirelessly play PC VR games on Quest headsets.

Meta also called on Google to bring its app marketplace Google Play to Meta Horizon OS, where the firm said it can operate with the same economic model it does on other platforms.

Meta claims to currently have over 1,000 apps in its Quest app store. In September 2022, the company said that it had generated over $2 billion in revenue from the sale of games and apps on the Quest Store.