After losing out to Apple and Google on smartphones, Facebook's big bets on VR and AR can be seen as attempting to control the next big hardware platforms
Ina Fried / Axios : Tweets: @deepakmohoni and @mattnavarra Tweets: Deepak Mohoni / @deepakmohoni : Behind Facebook's giant bet on hardware Facebook's foray into virtual and augmented reality, which it doubled down on this week, is a bet on where the future of online social interaction is heading https://www.axios.com/... Matt Navarra / @mattnavarra : Spot-on analysis of Facebook's big push into AR / VR hardware, by @inafried https://www.axios.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook's hardware push has been years in the making: CTO Mike Schroepfer argued back in 2018 that AR expertise was needed for Facebook to stay relevant in 10 or 20 years, and last December the company reportedly tasked a Windows NT co-author with building an OS from scratch so Oculus and Portal could stop relying on Android. What changed this week is framing: Axios is naming the strategy for what it is — a bid to own the next hardware platform after missing the smartphone one.
The pieces are already in motion. Facebook's [[a:957983|Project Aria AR glasses effort has ~100 testers in Seattle and San Francisco refining the experience]], and follow-up reporting this same week digs into the tech behind those glasses and how personal data from them would be used — the open questions that will decide whether consumers accept a social network on their face.
First-order effects
- Facebook moves from renting its mobile stack (Android) toward owning the full vertical — custom OS, headsets, glasses — meaning Oculus and Portal no longer route through Google's or Apple's gates.
- Project Aria's tester program puts Facebook's data-collection practices under immediate scrutiny, since the glasses' usefulness depends on sensing the wearer's environment.
Second-order effects
- Apple and Google, whose App Store control defines the smartphone economics Facebook resents, face pressure to accelerate their own AR efforts rather than leave the nascent platform uncontested.
- An independent OS for Oculus-class devices weakens Android's reach into emerging device categories, forcing Google to decide whether emerging hardware is worth defending as a distribution surface.
Third-order effects
- If the bet lands, platform power shifts from app-store gatekeeping to whoever owns the hardware-plus-social stack — the later Quest expansion into Work Accounts and business use (Horizon Home, Quest for Business) hints at Facebook extending that stack from consumer social into the workplace.
- The pattern suggests that after each platform transition, the incumbents of the previous era — here Facebook, having lost mobile to Apple and Google — pay whatever talent and capital it takes to avoid being someone else's tenant again; whether consumers accept a Facebook-owned face computer remains genuinely unresolved.
The trend: Companies that lost control of the smartphone platform are spending on custom silicon-to-software hardware stacks to own whichever of AR or VR becomes the next one.