How Developer Teams Are Using App Lab to Meet Their Goals

From humble beginnings as a mechanism for people to access unpublished apps without needing to sideload, App Lab has quickly grown to become an effective platform for many teams to accomplish their development and business goals.

Games such as Gorilla Tag have carved a path to success on the Quest Store partly through cycles of feedback and iteration while on App Lab, with others, like the survival-shooter Ghosts of Tabor are demonstrating how App Lab can help enable teams to grow an audience and drive significant revenue in a relatively short amount of time.

These success stories show just some of the possibilities App Lab can create, and we know that there are many developers out there looking for more effective ways to help build a sustainable business. Read on below to learn how you can use App Lab to strategize your business, and get inspired with real examples of developers who have used App Lab to meet their goals.

To help you focus on your audience, learn from them, and iterate on your app to deliver a great user experience, App Lab eliminates obstacles preventing you from getting the latest version of your app in the hands (or headsets) of users. People can quickly find, download, and update your app using an interface and ecosystem they’re familiar with, all without requiring sideloading.

“I was really excited to get on to App Lab purely to make that process easier for the people who are playing because now I can have access to the entire structure of being able to push out updates,” says Kerestell Smith, creator of Gorilla Tag and founder of Another Axiom.

Originally released in early 2021 before launching in the Meta Quest Store in late 2022, Gorilla Tag has garnered a wide audience over time thanks to its addictively engaging gameplay and strong word of mouth. Thanks to App Lab’s easy integration with the Quest ecosystem, Smith was able to deploy repeated updates and focus his time and energy on enriching the user experience.

“I was able to really rapidly update my iteration cycle because I was just trying to get as many things into the game, update things, fix bugs, deal with server issues, so being able to access all of those things was kind of the most important thing for me,” says Smith.

Every second saved adds up over the course of a development cycle, and having a means to reduce user friction when people want to access your app with each passing update means you’ll be able to spend more time focusing on building out your unique vision. Now, let’s see how some teams have used App Lab to do just that.

Most (if not all) apps don’t roll out to live audiences as fully polished experiences out of nowhere. App Lab can help you get there by enabling you to connect with an audience and experiment with features they’ll love—and if they don’t love them, you can use that feedback to iterate, improve, and release your next version.

“From the very beginning we knew we wanted to go to App Lab,” says Scott Albright, CEO of Combat Waffle Studios, the studio behind Ghosts of Tabor. “We had so many different interactive systems that had never been tested in VR, that really needed that user feedback from the community that we were growing. Without that user feedback, we would not have been able to grow in our different stages of the life cycle.“

Through alpha and beta testing with an increasingly wide group of users, Combat Waffle has been able to successfully deliver a thrilling and sticky extraction shooter which has helped deliver a more compelling experience that feels native to the medium, and one that stands out among VR first-person shooter (FPS) games.

Through a repeated cycle of iteration and feedback with scaled testing, you can also make measured progress working towards realizing your unique vision. Perhaps best of all, you’ll also be forming the foundation of your app’s audience moving forward, using your most passionate fans’ input to create an experience that resonates more broadly.

This approach can also be beneficial for published apps looking to push the envelope with new features—and fine tune them—without deploying to a wide audience. Take TRIPP as an example.

“Recently we launched a whole new breath detection AI that uses the IMU on the headset to recognize the head movement pattern when you inhale and exhale,” says Nanea Reeves, CEO and Co-founder of TRIPP. “On App Lab we launched a little primitive-looking AI bot that trained our AI model and we invited a small group of session leaders that do live meditation and Horizon Worlds to come and just breathe through that thing and train the AI, and then we opened it up to the broader community.”

Being able to scale new and experimental features with smaller audiences first is important because it allows you to identify and fix unexpected bugs which may disrupt the user experience and hamper engagement. Using the insights and tools in the following section, you can learn how to establish a group of app testers on various release channels and use social media to scale your audience.

How you build your audience and community of testers is up to you, but even if you don’t have a large marketing budget, there are a couple key tools and resources you can apply to quickly gather an audience and ensure they have access to the latest app updates as you iterate and improve your build.

The Release Channel URL Invite and Playtesting Feedback features were designed to help you easily establish a testing audience and get detailed, actionable insights from your audience. Now you can simply create an automatically generated URL to your release channel in the Developer Dashboard and share it with your audience on social media, on Developer Posts, or anywhere you want to reach your audience. After your testing audience starts engaging with your app, Playtesting Feedback enables them to capture video, images, text, and voice messages that provide clear context about what they’re experiencing. See an example of how Playtesting Feedback works below.

Creating a strategy for sharing release channel builds can allow you to segment audiences for specific purposes and can help ensure you’re in the driver's seat when it comes to delivering new features to a wider audience.

This method of segmenting users for testing has supported Smith and Gorilla Tag as its audience has rapidly expanded. “One of the things we’ve done recently with Gorilla Tag is we’ve created what we call the Alpha Squad which is a group of people that we send out new patches to earlier and they give us a little bit of feedback,” says Smith. “They help a lot with bug testing because these are the people who know the ins and outs of your game better than you do.”

Apps with more established audiences like TRIPP can also leverage existing channels to connect with groups of users who have already reached out to your organization and therefore may be more inclined to actively provide feedback. “We went through our customer support channel first and said ‘would you be willing to participate in a beta community?’ and the response was really terrific,” says Reeves.

The team at TRIPP also recently found that 42% of its paying user base have been using the app for roughly 12 months or longer, with those longtime community members helping make up part of that beta community. This shows how forming deeper connections with audiences through testing on App Lab can lead to tangible impacts on user engagement and retention over time.

If you’re starting from scratch with no audience, it’s important to build sustainability through organic engagement. That starts with basic visibility and helping people know how to find and download your app. Albright and Combat Waffle Studios created a simple but effective video for TikTok showing exactly where to find it. As of October 2023, the video has over 22k likes and was added to peoples Favorites over 3.5k times, showing just how valuable it can be to help people find where to download your app.

When it comes to generating traction for your app through social media, Albright recommends being active and focusing on creating a community and a great user experience for those early users in order to grow authentic engagement. “The community members are the ones who really kind of build that marketing effort, at least for us,” says Smith. “The response on TikTok and stuff from people who genuinely enjoy the game, who want to share it and are interested in it, they become your biggest advocates… if you serve their needs, they’ll give back.”

Taking an active role in sharing content with your early community can help ensure that what you do share with the world accurately represents your vision and the market you’re trying to reach. “We didn’t use influencers, we didn’t pay influencers. We went organic grass-roots with it and did it ourselves, so my suggestion is to bring it in-house, it’s worth hiring that person to work with you directly,” says Albright. This approach to community-building through in-house content allows you to get hands-on and utilize the connections and insights you gain with your community over time to produce content you know they’ll enjoy.

To learn more about how Ghosts of Tabor has leveraged in-house content on platforms like Discord and TikTok to grow an audience, check out this Q&A.

When it comes to creating in-house content, our VR and MR Capture Best Practices Playbook is a go-to resource for producing top-notch video assets that you can share on social media, over email, or anywhere you’re trying to reach an audience. You’ll find guidance on creating an impactful story through your marketing assets, techniques for capture, recording and editing, plus post-production tips to make sure you export your captures with the highest possible quality.

Developers shipping to App Lab also have access to some monetization and engagement features that can help you reward early testers and encourage people to try out your app for the first time. For example, Custom Promo Codes lets you create different discount codes within the Developer Dashboard that can be distributed to specific groups of users. You can apply these codes towards influencer campaigns, early adopters, in-person or digital events, and much more.

You can also visit our marketing best practices documentation to find recommendations for increasing visibility for your app on App Lab.

Oculus Start is a program created for developers who have either launched a VR app, or are on their journey towards releasing a VR app. Meta provides qualifying developers with access to hardware, developer support, a community of like-minded VR developers, as well as software related savings so you can focus on what's really important—creating inspired VR applications.

This is not a program for beginners. An uploaded Rift or Quest (App Lab channel) app submission is a requirement for acceptance into Oculus Start. Before applying to Oculus Start, be sure to be logged into your Oculus Developer account and have a build ready in your developer organization to get started. Learn more

We explored just a few of the ways App Lab can help set you up to accelerate your development journey and build a sustainable business. If you’re ready to start distributing your app on App Lab, visit the documentation to find technical and content guidelines before submitting your app.

To hear more about developers’ experience with App Lab, check out the Meta Connect 2023 session, “Unlocking Your App’s Potential on App Lab”.

For more developer news and updates, follow us on Facebook and X.