A non-inconsequential number of new Quest 3 and 3S headsets couldn’t update properly this past Christmas, leaving some users scrambling for last-minute replacements or knee deep in support chats looking for a fix to their freshly bricked VR headsets. Now, Meta has clarified just what transpired. And it wasn’t a buggy update either, as previously thought.

Mark Rabkin, Meta Vice President of VR/MR, took to X to explain why some Quest users were left to deal with spiraling boot loops on Christmas Day, forcing Meta to pause its latest v72 software update and ship affected users fresh units while it figured out the problem.

Essentially, Rabkin is describing a rare and long-undetected bug in the read/write (R/W) file system used by the Android Open Source Project (AOSP)meaning it wasn’t a problem specific to Quest’s Horizon OS.

The “race condition” Rabkin refers to is a behavior where the outcome depends on the sequence or timing of events, such as two processes accessing shared data simultaneously. These bugs are typically rare and difficult to reproduce. The specific bug in question, which he notes is actually four years old, caused file corruption during updates. These updates are required whenever a new Quest device is booted up for the first time.

Meta Quest 3S | Photo by Road to VR

While Meta introduced a software update tool last June that allows you to force OS updates via a PC tether, Quest critically doesn’t allow OS rollbacks, which exacerbated the problem.

Rabkin says that after fixing the bug, Meta is now “upstreaming” the fix, contributing their solution to the broader AOSP to help other developers avoid similar issues in the future.

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You can sideload content with privately-distributed APKs—as with most Android devices—although Quest is pretty obstinate when it comes to letting intrepid users muck around with anything under the hood, something that’s challenged jailbreakers in the past looking to divorce Quest from Meta services and do things like install custom ROMS and mods.

At the time of this writing, there is no widely publicized, confirmed jailbreak for Quest 3, although there have been attempts in the past. In late 2020, a crowd-funded group, which even attracted cash from Oculus founder Palmer Luckey, spurred on the race to jailbreak Quest 2, which, at the time, led an apparently successful method.

That specific jailbreak however was ostensibly debunked, as it was claimed the leading submission actually used a Virtual Machine (VM) to emulate a boot-unlock.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • STL

    Being in software development myself, I’m full of admiration for the engineers hunting down this little bastard of a bug! However, one day, a bug like this might be what saves humanity from extinction by Terminators!

    • Sven Viking

      I’m doing my part!

      • Coyoty

        You're a trooper.

    • Race conditions are among the worst bugs ever… difficult to find, difficult to reproduce, difficult to debug… I feel their pain

  • Jeremiah

    It's definitely still a thing, my dad bought a Quest 3S a week ago and had to have Amazon retrieve it and refund him after Meta messed him around. I was looking into getting a Q3, that'll be on indefinite hold now.

    • CharlieSayNo

      Can I ask in what way Meta messed him around?

      Surely a bricked Quest 3S is something they just automatically replace?

      • Jeremiah

        He said they weren’t believing him and were dragging their feet on giving a replacement, even though he tried their “solutions” that didn’t work. So he had Amazon refund it instead. It appears they still have a major problem on their hands.

  • Howard Beale

    I own a SW Dev co. I write Android apps to interface our hardware. We have wrestled with AOSP deeply embedded bugs.
    Meta's mistake was not the bug but not providing themselves an adequate fire exit. Developers are reluctant to write these because they are invariably become exploits.
    One of our tracking tools was suffering a similar fate but fortunately we had a fire exit where we could side an update. But to protect our device from being hacked, I introduced a time dependent hash sha256 key. We are SOX compliant so I have to pass security audits. Meta probably should have built in same.