There was a recent bit of unpleasantness in what’s otherwise usually — at least in public — the cooperative world of metaverse development. In a series of posts on Threads, Meta’s chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth responded to a recent report by The Information that the company rebuffed Google’s proposal to collaborate on the two companies’ virtual reality ambitions. “After years of not focusing on VR or doing anything to support our work in the space, Google has been pitching AndroidXR to partners and suggesting, incredibly, that WE are the ones threatening to fragment the ecosystem when they are the ones who plan to do exactly that,” Bosworth wrote, adding that Google proposed “restrictive terms that require us to give up our freedom to innovate and build better experiences for people and developers.” Without getting too far into the nitty-gritty of the two companies’ imminent competition — Google software will power Samsung’s new headset, which will directly compete with Meta’s Quest — the tiff reveals the power dynamics at the heart of the young industry. “[This is] direct competition on who’s going to dominate XR’s open OS, i.e. what’s the Android of the next computing ecosystem,” Yonatan Raz-Fridman, co-founder and CEO of the gaming company Supersocial, wrote to me today. “Meta wants to be to XR what Google was to mobile OS. I see zero reason why Meta would go with them unless they are losing, which for now, they are not.” The spat is an early crack in the united facade the companies have heretofore shown when it comes to VR. Meta and Google are both part of the Metaverse Standards Forum aimed at setting technical interoperability standards, and Meta uses a version of Google’s open-source operating system for their own. (The MSF declined to comment, saying the matter was unrelated.) But as the field evolves, and new hardware like Apple’s jaw-dropping (in quality and in price) Vision Pro enters the fray, that relative chumminess is bound to give way to old-fashioned, cutthroat competition. Apple is well-known for its closed development ecosystem, dating back to the earliest days of the personal computer. So as the next major computer platform develops, it’s only natural that everyone else would be scrambling once again to dominate the “open” market. But with such a massive number of consumers still unfamiliar with any virtual reality device — adoption still remains stubbornly low — it’s thus far been in everyone’s best interest to simply push the technology’s benefits, regardless of who is producing it. This is probably still the case: Meta and Google both declined to say anything further to POLITICO about the conflagration. However Google positions itself relative to Meta, the latter company is in a strong position as metaverse development heats up. They continue to lead the way in market share, and just announced a hardware partnership with LG for “next-gen VR device development,” although details are scant. Bilawal Sidhu, a former Google project manager, observed on X the many parallels between VR device competition and the early days of the smartphone. “If Meta + Google partnered up on Android XR — it’d be a force to be reckoned with, preventing ecosystem fragmentation that usually benefits Apple,” he wrote. “[But] the desire to own as much of this emerging platform is simply too strong. Zuck dropped the ball on mobile, and he won’t let that happen again.” Hurt feelings over the development and deployment of a new operating system might not seem at first glance like a big deal. But as Sidhu implies, to look at the history of how devices now as ubiquitous as the smartphone (and, of course, the personal computer) carved out their share of the market is illuminating. If virtual reality becomes anything close to the successor to these platforms that those building it hope it will be, spats like that between Bosworth and Google will be an important footnote when the story is written of who got to write its rule book.
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