With
Meta Connect 2024 right around the corner, now is the time to review the latest updates you might have missed over the past quarter before we unveil our vision for the upcoming year and dive into the latest developments in AI, mixed reality, and wearables.
We’ve compiled noteworthy updates that help your apps gain more visibility in search engines, enable you to access, evaluate, and forecast earnings with greater ease, build with our Interaction SDK sample in VR or MR mode, and test multiplayer experiences more efficiently. Dive in below to learn more about how these updates can enhance your development process and benefit your business.
Introducing SEO-Friendly Meta Horizon Store URLs
Whether people are looking for new apps on search engines or the Meta Horizon Store search bar, better discoverability means that people are more likely to learn more about your app and download it.
To drive better discoverability for all developers, we’ve updated app URLs in the Meta Horizon Store to be more SEO-friendly. These changes include moving away from using entity IDs to represent app product detail pages (PDPs), bundle PDPs, and section page URLs. Your app name is now included in your store URL and aligns with Google’s best practices for designing URLs and improving your SEO. Previous links to your Store URL will still work and take users to your app’s PDP. We’re excited to see how these changes improve search performance and benefit your business, and you can visit the Meta Horizon Store today to see how your app’s URL has changed.
View Financial Data in the Payout Hub
Making informed business decisions and monitoring the health of your business is only possible if you have readily available data. That’s why we recently launched the Payout Hub in the Developer Dashboard, which provides a simple way to see your aggregate earnings every month and forecast next month’s earnings.
Now you can access specific payouts and earnings reports, view transaction IDs, and address payment failures in one convenient location. This new page is hosted within the My Organization section of the
Developer Dashboard, which means you can find payout information for apps, add-ons, and subscriptions for each of your published apps. In the event of a payment failure, we recommend updating your banking information within the “Payment Information” section of the Payout Hub.
Here’s a quick summary of what you can access with the Payout Hub:
- Payment Information
- Payment Overview
- Payment Transactions
- Payouts - aggregate monthly for all revenue generated per app
- Financial Reports
Leverage Interaction SDK Sample App Additions
Utilizing hand-tracking capabilities can have a significant, beneficial impact on app engagement by allowing users to interact with virtual elements in more natural and intuitive ways. With fresh opportunities to build apps that enable users to use their hands in mixed reality environments on Meta Quest 3, we’ve worked to provide best practices that can help you support rich interactions when leveraging Passthrough.
Now you can leverage the
v68 Interaction SDK sample app to find examples of core interactions like poke, grab, ray, and snap being used with Passthrough and toggle between VR and MR. This update helps illuminate what seamless interactions should look and feel like within MR environments, providing a blueprint as you build out your next MR experience.
To learn more about the Interaction SDK sample app, please visit the
documentation.
Multiplayer Testing Improvements
Adding multiplayer support to your app often drives retention and engagement; however, testing multiplayer experiences can be challenging, increasing the time to develop and receiving low test coverage. To enhance the multiplayer testing process, we’ve made significant improvements that allow you to run multiple instances of your app on a single PC, making it a lot easier and quicker to test.
When trying to test your multiplayer app, you previously needed multiple devices and people. Manually copying files to multiple projects, building individually, and installing to multiple devices was error-prone and time-intensive. Now, instead of running an app on each device, you can run multiple instances of an app on a single PC by using
ParrelSync (Unity) and
Multiplayer options (Unreal).
We didn’t stop there. Testing your app’s multiplayer experience from a PC was difficult due to challenges in seeing and controlling your app like you would in-headset. Now, instead of relying on a mouse and keyboard on a 2D screen, you can control objects using physical controllers and test immersive 3D experiences by 1) selecting the instance to control with Quest Link by clicking the editor window, and 2) using
Meta XR Simulator.
Lastly, testing platform services was challenging. You could only log in to a single account and traveling was limited to the headset. With these new changes, instead of logging out and logging back in to switch between accounts, you can now log in with multiple test users using the
Platform SDK standalone mode. For travel, instead of running each app on the device to see the Meta Horizon OS UI, you can leverage the Multiplayer Testing Tool in the Developer Dashboard to see and test friend lists with the ability to send invites and have recipients receive a notification.
Jump into the documentation for Unity or Unreal to get started:
Unity
Unreal
Access the Latest Features in MQDH v4.9
Meta Quest Developer Hub (MQDH) is an essential desktop companion tool that streamlines app development for Meta Quest headsets. With the latest v4.9 update, we’ve made some quality-of-life improvements that can help you cast and test your apps more effectively.
What’s New in v4.9 (Windows only)
- Full-screen support for casting has been added to Windows devices, allowing for an enhanced viewing experience
Improvements and bug fixes with v4.9 (Windows and Mac)
- Improved clarity around build status after binary upload
- Fixed an issue preventing consecutive installations of APKs with the same name
- Fixed a casting issue in which certain toolbar items became unclickable after a notification banner was displayed
- Fixed a resizing issue during casting, where accessing a toolbar item caused the window to resize incorrectly (Mac only)
We hope you find these updates valuable and we can’t wait to hear how they help enhance your development process. For more developer news, tips, and stories, be sure to follow us on
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