Meta Horizon 9+

I e seen many 1 star reviews that make no sense. They are rating the app based on their experience with their headsets. If I were to review the Oculus Quest it would definitely get 4.5 stars. The app however gets a full five stars as it does so much cool stuff. My favorite thing is being able to check my battery while charging my headset. Also being able to see if I need new batteries for my controllers is awesome. I know those data points are on the Quest Menu Bar but when your charging you may not have the Quest available to check so you can use the app. I love that I can buy and install games directly to my headsets from the app too. There are just so many cool things this app allows you to do. I’ve seen lots of tech and I’m not easily impressed by tech nowadays however the Oculus Quest and this companion app have highly impressed me. I haven’t been wowed like this by tech since I first wrote a program in basic back on a TRS-80 (Trash 80 for those who remember them) in the mid 80’s(I’m old I know). Thanks for an exciting and joyous experience both in the app and on the console.

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.