Microsoft commits to letting others create app stores for HoloLens 2, impressing Epic Games' CEO, who pledges support, sees HoloLens 2 as a new era of openness
Tom Warren / The Verge :
Context & Ripple Effects
Microsoft's HoloLens 2 openness pledge is the latest step in a long-running posture: game chief Phil Spencer had already framed the company around openness across HoloLens and Xbox back in 2016, and Microsoft has been putting Xbox content on the headset since it announced bringing Xbox games to HoloLens in 2015. What changes here is the platform layer itself — Microsoft committing to let outside parties run their own app stores on the device.
The audience for that commitment matters as much as the commitment: Epic Games' CEO responds with a public pledge of support, casting HoloLens 2 as a new era of openness. Epic is the same company Microsoft would later back with an amicus brief in its App Store fight against Apple, so this 2019 moment reads as an early alignment between the two against closed-store models.
First-order effects
- Epic Games gains a standing invitation to bring its storefront ambitions to HoloLens 2, with its CEO publicly pledging support for the platform.
- HoloLens 2 developers get a signal that distribution won't be locked to a single Microsoft-run store — and the $3,500 developer edition shipping that year, with Unreal Engine 4 support promised by end of May, gives them a concrete toolchain to build against.
Second-order effects
- The commitment becomes a template Microsoft reuses at larger scale: two years later it opened the Windows Store to third-party app stores, with Amazon and Epic Games slated as the first storefront apps (the Windows Store opening).
- Apple's fully closed iOS store model faces a visible counterexample from a major platform holder, sharpening the contrast Epic would later litigate — with Microsoft eventually filing on Epic's side.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, app-store openness shifts from activist demand to competitive strategy among platform holders, with store economics becoming a differentiator rather than a fixed toll — a structural pressure regulators and antitrust fights have since amplified.
The trend: Platform holders are increasingly wielding app-store openness as a competitive weapon against closed ecosystems, with Microsoft and Epic emerging as recurring allies in that shift.