Meta has “paused” its initiative to bring third-party Horizon OS headsets to the market. The company says it has shifted focus to “building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market.”
The News
A little over a year and a half ago, Meta made an “industry-altering announcement,” as I called the move in my reporting: the company was rebranding the Quest operating system to ‘Horizon OS’ and announced it was working with select partners to launch third-party VR headsets powered by the operating system.
Meta specifically named Asus and Lenovo as the first partners it was working with to build new Horizon OS headsets. Asus was said to be building an “all-new performance gaming headset,” while Lenovo was purportedly working on “mixed reality devices for productivity, learning, and entertainment.”
But as we’ve now learned, neither headset is likely to see the light of day. Meta say it has frozen the third-party Horizon OS headset program.
“We have paused the program to focus on building the world-class first-party hardware and software needed to advance the VR market,” a Meta spokesperson told Road to VR. “We’re committed to this for the long term and will revisit opportunities for 3rd-party device partnerships as the category evolves.”
My Take
The news comes amid a shifting of priorities for Reality Labs (Meta’s AI and XR division). Seemingly aware that it needs to up its game on the ease-of-use and polish of its wearables, Meta recently announced that a long-time Apple design lead joined the company in an effort to “elevate design within Meta, and pull together a talented group with a combination of craft, creative vision, systems thinking, and deep experience building iconic products that bridge hardware and software.”
Further, the company is now reportedly “focused on making the [Reality Labs] business sustainable and taking extra time to deliver our experiences with higher quality.” Which has reportedly led to the decision to delay a forthcoming Vision Pro competitor into 2027, and possibly raising prices on future gaming headsets.
But Meta isn’t making these changes out of nowhere. The introduction of Vision Pro and now Android XR are creating new competition which Meta is responding to. Android XR, in particular, could have been a major foil in the Horizon OS third-party headset program.
Meta previously stated it wanted to be the ‘Android of XR’, an ‘open’ alternative to Apple’s approach with VisionOS. Opening up Horizon OS to new hardware partners was part of that play. But this was well before Android XR was actually announced. Now it’s becoming clear that the platform best positioned to be the ‘Android of XR’ is… well… Android XR itself. Without the backstop of app stores with millions of widely used apps (as VisionOS and Android XR have), Meta has found itself at a major disadvantage.
That’s not to say Horizon OS doesn’t have its own upsides. It clearly has the biggest and best library of immersive experiences on any standalone headset. But that may not have the same strategic value as the entire Google Play or App Store catalogs.
From the outset there’s also been another wrinkle in the third-party Horizon OS strategy: pricing. It’s well known that Meta sells its headsets at cost or perhaps even lower (hoping to make back the money on the software side), allowing it to outcompete practically any other headset maker on price. If you’re Asus or Lenovo, and your profit only stands to come from the hardware, how can you compete against the platform holder itself which is selling its own super low cost headsets?
If I were Asus or Lenovo, Android XR looks like a more welcome home for a third-party headset. Not only does it have the backing of the Google Play store and all the apps that come with it, but unlike Meta, Google is not (yet) competing with its own hardware partners.