Meta Ends Support for Quest 1: What You Need to Know
The Quest 1, initially released in May 2019 and known then as the Oculus Quest while Meta was still called Facebook, is seeing a gradual withdrawal of support from Meta. According to a report by UploadVR, starting from April 30th, new Quest Store creations and App Lab applications developed will no longer appear on the Quest 1 store page. Moreover, developers will be unable to upload new applications that only support Quest 1. Tools used for building multi-device applications will exclude support for Quest 1.
However, this restriction only applies to new applications; those that have already been launched on Quest 1 will not be affected, and developers can still push updates for these applications if they choose to do so. Yet, the corresponding SDK has ceased support for Quest 1 as of version 51, meaning that developers using SDK version 50 or higher are unable to push updates for Quest 1. Quest 1 also misses out on features such as dynamic resolution, super-resolution, and a virtual keyboard, available in newer versions of the SDK. This limitation has led many developers to discontinue support for Quest 1.
In January of the previous year, Meta announced that Quest 1 would enter its end-of-support phase, with its latest system update being V50. Nevertheless, it will continue to receive security patches and bug fixes until August of this year. It’s worth noting that the current latest system versions for the Quest 2, Pro, and 3 are now V63.
Given that the Quest 1’s SoC is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, which is significantly less powerful than that of the Quest 2, the decision to end support sooner rather than later might not be entirely unwelcome.
