Going Social: Sharing for Mobile Apps

Welcome to the first blog in our three part going social series: adding sharing to your application.

Whether you already have an application published on the Oculus Store or you are designing your first VR experience, the Oculus Platform SDK provides a variety of social features and services that can help make your app socially relevant.

As a developer, your ability to effectively scope out new content and provide added value is dependent, in large part, on cultivating and maintaining a user base that will want to continually revisit your application. Consider the users that provide public reviews of your application on the Oculus Store to be just like the test users your application depended on as it went through our release channels: a source of actionable feedback that help your application continue to evolve and grow.

Applications that incorporate social features can appeal to a wider audience by offering the potential for a community to form around them. Depending on the type of application you are designing, Oculus offers a variety of services and features that may align with your goals. Whether it be monetization, spreading awareness, or bringing together users in new and exciting ways with our rooms and matchmaking integration, our Platform SDK has you covered.

In this blog we will walk you through integrating Facebook sharing into your mobile application on the Oculus Store.

One option you can consider is adding our Facebook social sharing integration into your mobile application on the Oculus Store or soon after it has been published. Giving your users outlets to broadcast their personal experiences from within your application is a great method to encourage interactions within your application and to broaden its appeal to others who may not have tried it yet.

Integrating this type of sharing into your application offers the users of your application two methods to share content:

We recommend including a menu prompt in your application to notify users that your application supports Facebook sharing functionality. Users who wish to utilize the sharing framework within your mobile application must have a Facebook account linked to their Oculus ID, so please make sure to inform your users that they must go to the Settings Menu in their 2D Oculus Home app in order to link their Facebook account and enable sharing.

We have made the process of adding Facebook sharing to your application as seamless as possible. To enable sharing, locate the “Sharing App Content” menu under Platform Services for the application you wish to enable it for on the developer dashboard. Simply check the box in this menu and hit the save button to enable it. Your application is now opted-in to the Facebook sharing feature.

The below example illustrates the location of, and how to enable sharing for, the example application, “Roll-a-Rectangle PRO” an imaginary mobile application.

To enable livestreaming in your Unity project please make use of the following SDK methods for incorporating the functions of checking status, pausing, and resuming the livestream feature:

Check the livestream status:

Pause the livestream:

Resume the livestream:

Displaying how the user interacts with the control of their livestream is up to you, but we would recommend incorporating them in a visually intuitive way and when there is content or a multiplayer component that you would like to highlight from outside of your app. You can think of this feature as marketing for your application from your current user base to an audience of potential new users.

Below is an example of an in-app livestreaming implementation being broadcast to the Facebook platform allowing for real-time comments and interaction from that user's Facebook friends.

To enable photo sharing in your Unity project please make use of the following SDK method in your Unity application:

Platform.Media.ShareToFacebook

Photo sharing supports PNG, GIF, and JPEG image formats. Photos that users want to share should be saved internally in your application. When a user initiates the request to share a photo, the application should provide access to Oculus by sending a path with the appropriate permissions to a file saved in the internal storage directory for your application, otherwise the request will fail for the user.

Oculus will provide the modal displaying their chosen photo from your application, with the ability to add a comment and set the appropriate privacy settings prior to sharing it to Facebook.

For an example of this behavior, see the below image from our documentation that demonstrates this modal:

By opting into this functionality, you grant Oculus and other Facebook or third-party services the right to store and publicly perform/display the shared user app footage, images, and videos, and confirm that you have all rights and permissions necessary to permit this. You can disable this feature at anytime.

Want to know more about our social platform features?

Please feel free to explore the rest of our moderate to advanced features in our Platform SDK documentation's developer guide! We offer sixteen different social implementations that can add varying amounts of depth and immersion to your application from matchmaking players that want to compete head-to-head in your app, to additional methods of communication that can be offered via our Voice Chat (VOIP) integration.