As of today, developers can no longer support the original Oculus Quest in their store app updates, ending their ability to still support it.
Since May last year, new store apps haven’t been allowed to support Quest 1. Now, even apps which existed before that date can’t support Quest 1 in new updates.
If developers attempt to include Quest 1 support in their app manifest, Meta’s store system will automatically block it.
David Heaney
Our article from 2023.
Oculus Quest launched in May 2019, almost six years ago, featuring the two year old Snapdragon 835 chipset from 2017. Meta stopped selling Quest 1 immediately upon launching Quest 2, its twice as powerful yet cheaper successor, in October 2020.
Meta first announced the slow deprecation of Quest 1 in January 2023. The last operating system release it got was v50 in February 2023, and it stopped receiving security updates and bugfixes in August 2024. Quest 2, Pro, 3, and 3S are now on v72.
In practice, very few store apps still support Quest 1 today, regardless of this change. Meta’s SDKs dropped support for Quest 1 in v51, which released in April 2023. That means developers using SDK versions newer than v50, required for features like Dynamic Resolution, Super Resolution, Virtual Keyboard, Multimodal, and Quest 3 features like the mixed reality Scene Mesh, Depth API, and Inside-Out Body Tracking already couldn’t continue to support Quest 1.
Further, Quest 1 has just half the performance of Quest 2, which itself has less than half the GPU performance of Quest 3. Multiple VR game developers who have already dropped support for Quest 1 told UploadVR that it made up only a tiny fraction of their user base, while its anaemic eight-year-old chipset was burdensome to continue to support.
This isn’t yet the complete end of Quest 1 though. Quest 1 owners can continue to use their headset, and install and use older versions of existing apps that choose to continue to support it. However, still using Quest 1 isn’t exactly recommended, given that it no longer gets security updates.
Unlike with some other consumer electronics companies Meta doesn’t offer a trade-in program, so Quest 1 owners will need to pay the full price to upgrade to a newer headset, the most affordable (new) being the $300 Quest 3S.
David Heaney
