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.
Standalone VR and mixed reality developers already have to put significant effort in to optimize their apps to run well on mobile chipsets, and system-level performance regression essentially erases some of this hard work.
Puzzling Battery Saver Change
Another issue emerged through an intentional but misguided decision from Meta.
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 and frame 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 supports Application SpaceWarp. In the case that an app doesn't use AppSW (most do not) this causes a distracting double-imaging judder that makes many people feel sick, and these customers have been blaming the developers of the apps.
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. What's most puzzling here is how anyone with decision-making power at Meta could possibly have considered this a good idea in the first place.
Store Platform Bugs
Performance regression and the Battery Saver change are far from the only issues developers are encountering on Quest.
As well as the well-known SDK and Quest Link issues 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.
— Andrew Eiche (@buddingmonkey) May 11, 2025
The metrics sometimes just go missing for a week. We spend hours fighting MQDH and the store a day.
Not a welcoming ecosystem @boztank
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 from customers, who don't realize this is a problem on Meta's side. The only solution seems to be factory resetting the headset, a difficult ask to put it mildly.
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, while then VP of VR/MR 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.
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 and infrastructure quality; fully functional tools and services that they can rely on, and rapid fixes when issues do inevitably crop up.
