Meta CTO Andrew ‘Boz’ Bosworth says the company would “love” to have some sort of Discord integration on Quest in the future, pending interest from Discord, that is—once again highlighting the fact that Quest really just needs Google Play.

Meta isn’t exactly throwing its weight around to tempt Discord into supporting the Quest platform, although that’s probably equally true for a ton of services currently missing from Meta’s XR app store. The official Quest Store doesn’t have Spotify, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, TikTok, any VPN services, or any of the myriad of mobile apps and games that you can download right now on a $50 Android phone.

Granted, you can sideload those things on Quest with the help of SideQuest and the app’s specific apk file, or run many services in a web browser. Still, that’s a far cry from having them as officially integrated services you can just download from the store—like Apple does with Vision Pro, which, besides a few key competitors, supports millions of iOS apps.

In Bosworth’s latest Instagram AMA, he calls the issue “one of those things where, if you have friends and family at the Discord team, reach out and encourage them to consider it.” Putting that into perspective: the trillion-dollar market cap company hopes it can convince Discord by getting you to ask your cousin Rayray who works there.

“I’m sure everyone out there is exited to do integrations with them. If their product leadership is getting reach-outs from customers, saying “hey, this is a thing that I want,” hopefully that tips the scales in terms of [supporting Quest],” Bosworth says. “But in the meantime, the platform is open, the invitation is open. We’d love to have them in. I think it’s a great product and it would be a great fit for our two communities to come together.”

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Holding out hope for specific developer interest has basically been Meta’s modus operandi since the release of Samsung Gear VR in 2015—an ongoing side effect of not being able to tempt Google into bringing Play store to its Android-based VR headsets.

Bosworth says Google and Meta held talks in 2023, but ultimately Google was the one to leave the table. Now, months after those talks were held, Meta has ostensibly lost hope completely of getting that turn-key app support only Google can offer. Here’s what Bosworth said in March:

They could bring the Play store (with its current economics for 2d apps) and add value to all their developers immediately, which is exactly the kind of open app ecosystem we want to see. We would be thrilled to have them. It would be a win for their developers and all consumers and we’ll keep pushing for it.

Instead, they want us to agree to restrictive terms that require us to give up our freedom to innovate and build better experiences for people and developers—we’ve seen this play out before and we think we can do better this time around.

Whatever the case, Google may have its reasons why it can’t (or won’t) bring its millions of mobile apps to Meta’s fast approaching family of devices. It may be getting ready to compete with the help of Samsung. Maybe. We still haven’t heard anything about that device, or whether Google is actually putting real skin in the game with the release of a fully-fledged Android XR operating system fit to launch on other headsets, so there’s no telling what will happen.

In the meantime, Meta appears to be looking to out-Google Google by releasing its XR operating system to third-party OEMs for the first time, which initially is set to include ASUS, Lenovo, and Xbox. Still, it remains to be seen whether Meta can attract that critical mass of Android developers in time to compete with Apple as it eventually releases its second (hopefully cheaper) iteration of Vision Pro. To do this, Meta needs to sell a lot of XR headsets running its Horizon OS (ex-Quest OS) to get those developer eyeballs looking in the right place.

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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.
  • GUEST

    Uh, isn’t Discord basically a competing social media platform, and on top of that, one with horrible user interfaces on BOTH mobile and desktop?

  • FrankB

    Discord is a horrible platform, I’m at a loss to understand its enduring popularity.

    • ViRGiN

      and everything ever said or shared there will be forgotten/extremely difficult to find, compared to traditional forums, which are nearly exticnt, but all the info is easily accessible instead relying on live chat.

      • Ondrej

        The hell has frozen. You actually wrote something I agree with.

    • Andrey

      My “favorite” part about it that nowadays many developers (especially indie) that “want to be on the same wavelength as youth” use it as their primary – if not only – place to contact and inform their players about updates/gathering bug reports and so on. Like they release their game on Steam – and then doesn’t use neither Steam’s patchnotes functionality or Discussions at all. Not to mention that their [game’s] official site consists only of just a couple of artworks/screenshots and you can’t even submit a bug report there.
      I just love when people screame on the Internet about “100500 different launchers that they are forced to install just to access games from different publishers” yet noone cares about the fact, that they are forced to instal yet another application that is not really needed for such functionality.

      • philingreat

        I am flabbergasted that on the Meta Quest store there is no way to contact a game studio for support. Users need to leave a review if they have an issue.

      • Ondrej

        Because, as usual, the complaints aren’t truthful. It’s all about lifestyle and fitting in with the tribe.

        Let’s not forget that in the 00s Steam was hated, despised and boycotted by a lot of devoted “gamers”. One of the main reasons was the inability to re-sell a game and boxes became just containers for a Steam key instead of actually giving you ownership of the software.

        Nothing changed about it, some people forgot about the issue, new kids don’t even remember it, so now Steam isn’t the evil platform that ruined the gaming, but the only accepted one for PC.

        Hard to keep up with the tribalism, trends and “current things” – and they sometimes go 180. The internet kids collective makes an unanimous judgement of the cool, not cool things and the witches to burn and then corporations follow or clench teeth trying to wait out (worked incredibly well for Valve). Funny how it works.

    • Because there are so many scumbags in the World/online, they baturalky gravitate to cesspools likwme that to be with their ilk.
      []^ (

  • Christian Schildwaechter

    I doubt that Meta will attract lots of Android developers to port existing apps with Meta’s announced Spatial App SDK due to the limited market of ~7mn active Quest users interested mostly in VR games, not 2D apps. With PlayStore not available, and Meta not wanting to push sideloading, maybe one of their new hardware/OS partners could open their existing Android app stores.

    Pretty much all larger Chinese phone manufacturers have their own stores. Tencent was supposed to bring Quest to the Chinese market (currently on hold), has a large store with 156mn monthly users/16% Chinese market share, with a focus on games. Lenovo will support Horizon OS and has LeStore for both Windows and Android apps, with ~8.5mn monthly users, < 1% market share.

    These currently operate only in China, with many PlayStore apps not found there, but it should at least be a lot easier to convince developers publishing on Tencent's store to also allow app distribution outside of China and/or on Quest than for Meta to get them to provide Quest versions. Google just got kicked in court and will have to make access to alternate app stores easier, so Tencent with the world's largest revenue from video games might be interested in expanding outside of China just to sell on phones, with Quest a nice extra. If their revenue share is (significant) below Google's 30%, they might even get Epic to publish Fortnite there, which would draw a lot of people.

    None of these options are great, but maybe better than not having any 2D Android app store.

  • eadVrim

    Quest is a VR 3D MR device not for 2D apps. I even hate 180/360° 2D videos in the Quest feed. If I want flat apps I prefer use phone ot tablet.

  • Guest

    Google again being selfish but also indecisive. Either get with the program with Android XR or get out of the way and let others do it, Pichai. Stop holding us all back.

  • Can’t Meta just open their own “Droidapps” section
    in the HorizonStore since Android is “free & open” …??

  • “ask your cousin at Discord”… what a great strategy for a trillion dollar company…

  • ZarathustraDK

    Why petition Discord? Just use Revolt and build it into the os. It’s open source so you can do whatever you want. Yeah it lacks webcam streaming, but wtf would you use that with an HMD on?

    Oooh…you want the discord-users to buy a quest, ahhh you want discord to maintain their software for you, hmmm you don’t want to do any work yourselves… poor multi-billion dollar company.

    • ViRGiN

      This sounds like someone addicted to SteamVR

  • ManFredMann

    Meta approached Google, with Meta simply being left on “Read”. They are not interested, likely because the Goog, Samsung and Qualcomm are working on their own VR headset and want the play store exclusivity.

  • Ondrej

    If I were Meta I would make a WINE-like translational layer, so any Windows for ARM binaries would just run. Adopt one of the x86 emulators form Linux and they would get the access to the greatest free market of software that ever existed.
    No need for any permissions. Microsoft has that “problem” all their platform’s software is independent from their Store. And Linux is now exploiting it.

    With ARM becoming mainstream on PC it will only be easier.

    They won’t consider it because they desperately want that 30% TAX for software. It’s the whole reason they acquired Oculus.

  • Dave

    Never use Discord personally. To much hassle. I usually just have Whatsapp groups, works well on Desktop/Phone when I do MSFS and when I’m in VR using the Quest Whatsapp. That’s really all I need. I don’t think I need Google Play for anything in VR, happy for you to keep offering me ideas.