Get Your App Ready for the Meta Horizon Store

Earlier this year, we shared our vision for the Meta Horizon Store. This change will help more developers find and grow an audience by providing apps that are new to the Store with greater discovery and visibility as we work towards building the mixed reality ecosystem of the future.

We’re excited to deliver better opportunities to expand your reach with Meta Horizon users, and we’ve been working on resources to help you navigate these changes while maintaining a high standard of quality throughout the ecosystem.

To help ensure a smooth submission process and help you prepare for this transition, we’re providing details below on what this change entails along with recommended steps to get your apps ready.

Dive in to learn more about what actions you need to take and the resources available to support your success in the Store:

Once we have moved all App Lab apps to the Store, you will receive an email.

Apps submitted to the Meta Horizon Store must meet a variety of Virtual Reality Checks (VRCs) involving functionality, performance, security, accessibility, and more to be approved for distribution. Meeting all VRCs will help improve visibility and strengthen trust between you and your app’s users while helping to ensure an enjoyable experience for everyone.

We’ve updated our VRCs to consolidate the Meta Horizon Store and App Lab requirements into one guide to ensure a smooth and simple process. Updated VRCs your app must pass to get onto the Store include the following:

You can also review test plans to understand the exact criteria we use to test your apps during the review process.

Metadata includes descriptions, creative assets, keywords, and other categorical labels regarding your app. Updating your app’s metadata helps to ensure your app is discoverable and can easily be found when users browse and search for app experiences in the Store.

Some key metadata to review and update includes:

*You will be able to update Comfort Level and Keywords once your app has been moved to the Meta Horizon Store.

When reviewing assets and media, it’s important to provide a compelling and accurate visual representation of your app experience to delight users. As more app experiences enter the ecosystem, relevant keywords are increasingly important to distinguish your app from similar experiences.

You can update your app’s metadata within the Developer Dashboard, and additional features such as A/B testing can help you measure asset performance to get better engagement and sales from your app’s Product Details Page (PDP). To view more details on updating your app’s metadata, visit our documentation.

If your app is still a work in progress, you can now activate Early Access to help set expectations regarding user experience and reviews. Early Access is available to developers who are publishing their first app submission to the Store and App Lab apps. Apps that enable Early Access will still be discoverable and searchable in the Store. On August 5, apps who have opted into Early Access will have a badge on their Product Details Page. If your app is in App Lab, you have until August 5, 2024 to select this flag in the App Submission page on the Developer Dashboard. After August 5, you will have to create a new app to enable Early Access.

If you would like additional time to finetune your apps, ensure you’re meeting all required VRCs, or want additional time to get user feedback before launching your app on the Store, you can delist it from the Developer Dashboard.

Meta Quest Release Channel features provide a simple and convenient solution for releasing an early version of your app to limited audiences and gather additional user feedback before submitting it for a full launch. Private release channels enable you to invite users via email or URL, and added users will continue to have access to updated versions of your build until they are removed or the release channel is deleted.

Release channel invite URLs can be created in the Developer Dashboard and will be active for 90 days before being disabled unless a new build version is uploaded. To learn more about Release Channel features and invites, visit the documentation.

If you’re using scalable resources for your app like cloud tools, make sure you have resources to scale in case you see an influx of users. Maintaining stability and performance will help ensure people have a better experience upon installing and engaging with your app for the first time once it’s available in the Store.

Once you’re published to the Store, you’ll also be able to leverage a variety of monetization and engagement features previously only available to apps in the Meta Horizon Store. In our next blog series on the Meta Horizon Store, we’ll dive deeper into features like A/B Testing, Subscriptions, Try Before You Buy, Short Links, and much more to help you capitalize on the additional visibility and make a splash in the Meta Horizon Store.

We can’t wait to deliver a more open ecosystem to help you build incredible app experiences and reach audiences at scale. Together, we can drive innovation further to unlock new use cases, delight users, and build the future of mixed reality.