Develop

Built-in apps

Updated: Sep 3, 2026
Plenty of app journeys leave your app and come back: an OAuth handoff opens a browser, a purchase opens the store, a share sheet opens a file or photo picker. Without those destination apps, the journey dead-ends and you reach for a device.
Meta Spatial Simulator ships four of them, which keeps the whole flow in the simulator.
AppWhat you can test
Browser
OAuth, and any web handoff that leaves your app and returns
Store
Entitlement and purchase journeys
Files
System file picking and sharing
Gallery
Media picking and sharing
Launch any of them from the home screen, the same way a user would.
The Meta Spatial Simulator home screen showing the Browser, Gallery, Store, and Files app icons

Store needs an account

Store is the one built-in app that prompts for sign-in when you launch it. Sign in first, or expect the prompt as part of the flow you are testing. See Sign in to the simulator.

Opening the built-in apps

The built-in apps are already installed. To add your own app to the home screen, install it on the running simulator. Pass -r to replace an earlier build and keep its data:
metavr app install -r ./app/build/outputs/apk/debug/app-debug.apk
Your app then appears next to the built-in apps. The home screen refreshes when the package installs, so you do not need to restart the simulator.
Select an app’s icon to open it, whether it is a built-in app or your own. Store prompts for sign-in first. To open your own app from a script instead, pass its package name to metavr app launch:
metavr app launch com.example.myapp
To test how your app behaves when it shares the screen with other apps, see Test multiple windows.

Settings

The Settings menu in the simulator is the simulator’s own, covered in Test Look and Pinch. The simulator does not ship the Horizon OS Settings app, so a flow that hands off to device settings cannot be tested here.