I am legit excited about the idea of having VR eye contact, and would gladly pilot headsets for my team. But nobody wants to be on Facebook's platform. It's embarrassing to even talk about it. And I'm frustrated that something that should be a fun, cool, liberating, wide open new platform is so stifled and locked down.
It’s far less locked down than an iPhone.
When did that happen? Last I checked, sideloading was a potentially bannable offense (as in effectively bricking your device and losing you your Facebook account).
For a more managed option, there’s SideQuest:
Also Meta itself offers AppLab which is a less strictly curated app store.
Meta desperately wants you to write apps for the Quest platform. Nobody is getting banned. (You don’t need a FB account anymore either.)
Even if they have now changed their opinion on what can be done a large amount of damage is done. No-one will actively monitor that have their changed their terms. I was also under the impression that it's FB account and do the tiniest mistake and you lose it all. Thankfully it's just FB account so unlike with Google no real damage will be done.
Even if the things are better now I kinda have moved on, like many others.
The "grey area" is modding games(notably Beat Saber), since it involves replacing the APK with an altered one without the consent of the developer. And if the developer sells DLC, that cuts into their profit and maybe they'll threaten to sue Facebook for damages since they created the development tools and authorized development accounts that allow people to do it.
For much of the world, Whatsapp video calls were the standard way to keep in touch.
A large number of people in your circle / on HN / etc perhaps, but I think the vast majority of the general population have no such concern.
Facebook is not very popular among IT people in corporate world.
The story mode was much loved as well - my mother (an ex kindergarten teacher) would read the stories to my niece and nephew and they loved the AR effects and filters it applied to her, in tandem with the story.
My family uses them so my parents can see my kids and they are great. We plop down on the floor in front of it and everyone has a chat, sees the kids, etc. propping up phones and straining to hear/see things is much inferior.
This was conceived prior to the implosion of the Facebook brand during the Cambridge Analytical revelations. It's hard to say for sure how successful Portal would have been in another universe where that didn't happen.
If it worked the way people wanted and was available in April 2020 people would have used it.
If you talk about privacy they don’t care but they absolutely do when it comes to “I was talking to my friend about X and suddenly I’m seeing ads for it everywhere - my phone must be listening to me”. Their phone may not actually be listening to them but as soon as they see what it means, people hate how their data is used. They just never made the connection before.
Have you ever heard of Whatsapp? More than a billion people use it for private communication daily. Maybe not in the US, but elsewhere on the planet. You know who owns Whatsapp? Meta does.
Granted that they've at least tripled MAU since, but that's the power of network effects. There's a heavy dose of "in spite of" rather than "because of". On the other hand if Meta tried to, say, merge Whatsapp and Facebook Messenger, I think they'd lose half their users overnight.
Similarly, if Meta bought Zoom (and kept it running as it does today), most businesses probably wouldn't switch. Zoom already owns the market.
Zoom's continued survival still surprises me. There was a point in time during its meteoric rise, early in the pandemic, when stories broke about it being spyware for China and a security threat, and its use was subsequently banned in many places. Then some months later people were back to using it, as if nothing ever happened.
Meanwhile in TEAMS people dont know how to do things.
Recently I had a meeting that was supposed to be recorded, firsf nobody could record it; now the supplier side does not know how to share it as a downloadable file.
The Microsoft cloud experience is pure trash from productivity point of view.
In comparison, I use teams for my two person startup and we can only get that absolute trash fire working reliably about 75% of the time.
Facebook messenger is another example, hundreds of million of people use it all the time.
You are arguing against an obviously silly false premise. I said "large numbers of people" were unwilling to use FB for private communication.
In fact, it lost quite a bit of users when Facebook bought it, as many tried to move their networks to Signal, Threema etc
So what was said is exactly right: nobody trusts Meta, rightly so
By the way, case in point, look what happened about Facebooks promise to keep Whatsapp data separate and private
Seriously, this is a really dense comment from previous poster. Sure people don't like the idea of a dedicated hardware appliance with camera and microphones from Meta but the idea that folks are so paranoid that they won't use any of Meta's private communications systems or infra is beyond out of touch with reality.
I had a couple models of Portal. Really useful products but they literally didn't iterate on adding features fast enough and they locked it out from the existing Android ecosystem. Too complacent IHMO. On top of that the built-in browser was a purposely limited version of chromium that seemed like whatever the custom user-agent was would just cause problems with all sorts of web-apps especially Google's (couldn't even sign into YouTube etc, got "unsupported browser" errors all the time).
The Portal TV is still the only good Consumer Home TV based VC system I've ever used (so good that its the only Portal device Cisco wouldn't ship WebEx on probably because it would be too competitive against their own hardware I suspect is the reason).
I wouldn't be surprised if Meta was the number one way people have private conversations on planet earth.
Talking about company ip? Not a chance in hell.
When making a purchasing decision for company comms tools, guess which of those two have to be considered.
Personally I wouldn't use any chat service for super sensitive conversations about company comms and IP that didn't have strong encryption as well as limitations on how messages can be backed up as well as disappearing messages. I think Signal is the only system that is semi-popular that does this where by default backups don't leave the device unencrypted.
If it's just Android then yeah, intercept the camera API to let the portal stuff work with any app and you've got yourself a killer product getting put on every grandparents TV.
Privacy is taken more seriously at Facebook than any other place I've ever worked. It's drilled into you from day one that we have systems in place to catch you accessing things you shouldn't and you will be immediately fired if you do.
You can make mistakes that bring the entire site down and cost the company millions and they won't fire you. If you try to bypass privacy controls on an ex-girlfriend's post, you're gone.
Yes, they hoover up a ton of personal data. But they guard it like the crown jewels. If you do want your data deleted, they'll delete it. I've worked on the systems responsible for this where we had to reason through what to do with things like offline backups.
I know there are lots of problems here knowingly redefining the meaning of sell in this regard, but doing so is really harmful to the privacy cause since most companies do actually sell user data so we need that distortion.
Selling the data itself would be giving away a huge component of what differentiates their product from other advertising platforms. It would be like Coca Cola selling the recipe for Coca Cola.
Unless you are selling it to the highest bidder on behalf of the company, and that gets you an immediate promotion.
Thanks for your insight, but the Portal failure shouldn't be surprising. There are a large number of people who would never want to have a private conversation or meeting using Facebook infrastructure or be forced to create a Facebook account to join a meeting. As far as Zoom support, again, why would anyone trust Facebook infrastructure with private meetings?
Aside from the trust issue, why buy hardware from FB just to have meetings?