As Horizon OS Advances, Developers Face Bugs & Performance Regression
Meta's frequent Horizon OS updates are coming at the cost of performance issues and bugs for Quest developers, with users often blaming them.
Meta's frequent Horizon OS updates are coming at the cost of performance issues and bugs for developers.
Quest headsets arguably get new features, improvements, and changes at a greater pace than any other consumer tech device. Last year alone, for example, Meta overhauled how Horizon OS handles 2D apps to allow free positioning and keeping them open inside apps, delivered significant upgrades to Quest 3's passthrough and hand tracking, and made dozens of other changes.
These new Horizon OS versions arrive almost every month, in stark contrast to Apple and Google's strategy of shipping most new features in yearly releases. And this seems to be coming at a cost.
Performance Regression
On an internal Meta issue tracking forum for select developers of successful store apps, the current most upvoted issue describes how the frame rate in apps has been steadily declining with each operating system release.
The issue report includes screenshots of average FPS logs documenting this decline, which began with v72 and has continued to get worse through v74, v76, and the pre-release builds of v77.
The issue has a significant number of upvotes compared to the average issue, yet has seen no response from Meta.
Puzzling Battery Saver Change
Quest 3 & 3S offer a Battery Saver toggle in their settings. Since its debut at the launch of Quest 3, this feature capped the refresh rate to 72Hz, forced on fixed foveated rendering, and reduced the brightness to 50%.
But since v76, Meta silently changed the behavior of Battery Saver to instead force the refresh rate to 90Hz but cap the app frame rate to 45FPS. This, to be clear, happens regardless of whether or not the app uses Application SpaceWarp. In the case that an app doesn't use AppSW, this causes a distracting double-imaging judder that makes many people feel sick, and in many cases these people blame the app they're using.
This change to Battery Saver was not communicated to either developers or users, and Meta has now told developers that it's reverting the change, though as of the time of writing it still remains.
Store Platform Bugs
Performance is not the only issue developers are encountering on Quest.
As well as the various SDK and Quest Link issues and that have plagued Quest development for years, the store backend is a constant source of frustration. Meta Quest backend is so cooked. For a group that supposedly runs multiple billion+ user apps the developer tech is noticeably decaying.
The metrics sometimes just go missing for a week. We spend hours fighting MQDH and the store a day.
Not a welcoming ecosystem @boztank— Andrew Eiche (@buddingmonkey) May 11, 2025
Analytics for example often simply disappear, with the CEO of the studio behind Job Simulator and Dimensional Double Shift publicly describing the developer tech as "noticeably decaying".
Another issue developers have faced is players suddenly losing access to purchased DLCs. This, as you'd expect, leads to angry support messages and emails to developers, who don't realize this is a problem on Meta's side. The only solution seems to be factory resetting the headset, an arduous task.
Meta Quest's "Stable Era"
At Meta Connect 2024, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth apologized to developers for the "constant state of change" involved in building for Quest, and Mark Rabkin promised "a stable era".
"It can be incredibly messy, and we know it's been a tough ride for developers over the last couple of years", Bosworth said. Bosworth's apology to developers at Meta Connect 2024.
Bosworth and Rabkin were mostly referring to shifting APIs, SDKs, and featuresets, and some developers do appreciate the consolidation on these issues. But what all developers want now is more focus on software quality; fully functional tools and services that they can rely on, and rapid fixes when issues do inevitably crop up.
