Today, I opened the Meta Ray-Ban app to download some videos I recorded on my glasses over the weekend, only to be greeted by an AI-generated video of President Trump getting arrested at the White House. Some might celebrate this kind of video. Others might be so pissed off that they immediately uninstall the app.
Regardless of your political stance here, one thing is true: this kind of content doesn't belong in the app I'm required to use in order to interface with my Oakley Meta or Ray-Ban Meta glasses.
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To a different degree, the same kind of sloppy app design has been plaguing Meta Quest users for the last year. Last year, Meta started pushing its Horizon Worlds metaverse apps to more platforms, culminating with a mobile-first approach when the company rebranded the Meta Quest app to Meta Horizon.
The obvious problem here is that I don't use this app to play sloppy Roblox-style social games with friends on my phone. I use it to connect to my Meta Quest and, hopefully, to browse for new VR games and apps.
This ridiculous scope creep has been ruining Meta's two best hardware products, and it's high time Meta gets a clue. Meta Quest gamers don't want to play lousy free-to-play games on their phones through the Meta Quest app. Likewise, Ray-Ban or Oakley Meta users have no desire to browse AI slop Instagram reels when they're just trying to connect to their smart glasses.
Meta needs to return to its roots and provide users with what they want, rather than continuing to inject its unwanted content into unrelated apps. If users really want to browse AI-generated social media, make it a new tab in the Instagram app. If some mobile gamers want to join Horizon Worlds on their phones, make it a separate app.
Heck, dropping that in the Facebook app makes a lot more sense than it being in the Meta Quest app, especially when putting this content front and center is contributing to lower sales on your own video game platform. Get it together, Meta, or users will find a better alternative.
