Meta Quest 9+

Casting is useful but I wish it worked with more devices like AppleTV. The store is frustrating to use. New and updated apps are not highlighted well. You used to be able to dig into the app details and see the “Developer Update” messages, but these seem to be gone now, so it is hard to know what changed. Being able to review developer release notes (most recent shown first) that apply to apps I own would be nice. Filtering and sorting apps is cumbersome. I wish you could sort by user star rating in the store. I would like to be able to filter apps in the store so I can just see apps that I do not own (sensible default) or apps that I own. Being able to filter apps I own would be useful when I want to browse my apps to decide which one I want to gift to a friend, though this wouldn't be needed if "My Library" supported filtering and sorting by user star rating. That way when a friend asks me what are the best multiplayer apps that I own, for example, it would be easy to just see which popular ones I own and make a recommendation. I wish it showed the price of apps that I own more visibly, so I can consider this when recommending an app to a friend.

Casting is clunky. Screenshots and videos for games won’t display in landscape view, even though they’re oriented in landscape view. Will get trapped in full screen mode with no way to back out so I just have to close the app entirely (there is an “X” icon but tapping it does nothing). Games purchased by one user not available to the other user. My wife bought the oculus for me (yes I call it oculus because meta is a stupid name) and she bought several games with her profile before giving me the machine. Then I made a profile and bought games, and now we need to switch back and forth between profiles to access the different games bought by each profile. So dumb. Connecting with friends in the oculus is way more clunky than it should be. We always have problems. For example, we’ll both send invites to each other and they don’t come through for either party. Sometimes we’ll join a party and the audio isn’t working, so we have to power off and try connecting again. I never have these problems on my Xbox/PC/PlayStation.

The oculus is super fun and has a ton of potential! It has so many bugs though. I’ve had to factory reset my device twice because of bugs that don’t go away. The most recent time was because the grid (the boundary of the oculus environment) would not go away. Nothing except a factory reset fixed the problem. There have been many other bugs, those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head.

The app is presented to the user in a useful and intuitive way, but lacks execution. Exhibit A; the recently added Mixed Reality Camera (a feature which made me immediately re-download the app). For those who don’t know, this gives the user the capability to record yourself in your surroundings in VR, with augmented-reality capable phones (iPhone 7 Plus and up)*. This feature just doesn’t work. The app in the headset tells me to use the phone and the phone just casts, doesn’t offer anything else where everything should be. Exhibit B; the phone notifications. This feature works maybe 60% of the time and refuses to let me unpair the headset to the phone via Bluetooth when I need to repair it (I CANT DELETE THE HEADSET FROM MY BLUETOOTH), which I need to repair the system if the notification flow to the headset stops. This is a pity as this capability was added a while ago and still hasn’t really been patched. At this point this app just gives your headset a bunch of half-baked capabilities that only work half of the time. Wouldn’t suggest use after you’ve gotten past initial setup of headset.

*in the instructions it says iPhone X and up, but the supposed capability is aligned with the 7 Plus, and has been seen in other instances working as well as the new phones. In short, there’s 0 reason why this shouldn’t LOAD, not that it should work or connect.