Gear Up for 2024 with Major Updates Available Today

Between the launch of Meta Quest 3, new capabilities like the Depth API, and many other new features, 2023 has been an exciting year to develop on Meta Quest. The year may be coming to a close, but that doesn’t mean we’ve slowed down working on ways to help you find even more success next year.

We've introduced a variety of new updates designed to accelerate how you build, manage your apps and grow your audience. From short links that let you track impressions and conversions on nearly any platform, to brand new headset settings eliminating repetitive steps and more, keep reading to learn about updates you can use to achieve more in 2024.

When you’re marketing your app, knowing which strategies are effective can save you time, energy, and money. With Short Links, we’re giving you a brand new self-serve tool to track the source of traffic to your content and gain insights into which channels are driving engagement. This can help you adjust marketing strategy on-the-fly to maximize engagement and revenue.

Short Links can easily be created and managed from its new page in the Developer Dashboard, and you can instantly use them to share your app on social media, email, or any off-platform surface. Tracking the performance of your links is as easy as visiting the Short Links page, where you’ll find clicks and impressions to various conversion goals, including app entitlements, IAP purchases, app launches, and app installs.

To get started with Short Links, please visit the documentation.

It’s important you have the flexibility to manage your apps across different Meta Quest devices. Headsets like Quest 3 and Quest Pro offer different advanced capabilities and apps using SDK v51 or higher are not supported on Quest 1. Starting today, you have the option to specify which devices your build supports either before uploading your build—by setting the necessary parameters in your android manifest, upload CLI arguments or MQDH settings—or after through the Developer Dashboard. A single build can target all Meta Quest devices or can specifically target Quest 1, Quest 2, Quest Pro, Quest 3, or future Quest devices.

There are many scenarios Device Targeting makes easier:

Our new documentation walks you through each of these scenarios so you know how to effectively leverage this feature to manage your content with greater precision and flexibility.

We’ve added new, persistent developer settings to Meta Quest headsets that you can instantly access for a smoother development experience. To access these settings on your headset, go to Settings > System > Developer and toggle “Enable Custom Settings” on. If “Enable Custom Settings” is toggled off, then the new headset developer settings disappear and they revert back to their original values.

Here’s a breakdown of the new headset settings:

This setting allows you to disable the “USB Detected” notification from showing on your headset when it connects to a machine, removing an unnecessary notification and reducing confusion.

This setting allows you to disable the Boundary feature on your headset so that you can test your code changes without needing to set up or confirm any boundaries.

This setting allows you to test your code changes faster by automatically starting a USB Link session when you plug in your headset to your PC running a Quest PC app. If you experience an unintentional disconnect from your USB Link session, this setting can also help you automatically reconnect back into USB Link.

This setting will now reconnect the session if it is disconnected due to one of the following reasons:

If you previously disabled system sleep or avoided certain activities with the intention of maintaining the USB Link session, please test out these new changes and let us know if you have any feedback.

To continue bringing improvements to our in-market products, we are rolling out a performance boost for Quest Pro MR profile later in December. We are delivering CPU improvements by 34% (from 1.38 GHz to 1.86 GHz, which is 10% more capacity than Quest 3 at Launch) and GPU improvements by 7% (from 490 MHz to 525 MHz) with a boost up to 19% if Dynamic Resolution (Unity | Unreal) is turned on compared to launch. These improvements allow more flexibility and power for existing MR games and apps, as well as those in development. As a result, your users will have a smoother app experience. This should also simplify your development, aligning Quest Pro to the CPU and GPU improvements we previously made to Quest 2. See the below table of CPU and GPU frequencies.

Every second you save adds up quickly over the course of an app development cycle. Now with Ovr-platform-util version 1.92, you can see a significant reduction in build upload time, with some titles like Asgard’s Wrath 2 getting a 2x improvement on average.

These optimizations work best for large uploads that contain multiple files, and all you need to do to enable them is update to the latest version of Meta Quest Developer Hub (MQDH) or you can run the following command to update to the latest version:

2023 was a huge year for Meta Quest, and we’re excited to see how you leverage these updates in 2024. To stay up to date on more developer news and updates, be sure to follow us on Facebook and X.