The operating system powering Apple’s rumored virtual or augmented reality headset may be called realityOS, MacRumors has reported. The term was spotted by multiple sources in recent GitHub open source code and App Store upload logs. “What is Apple’s realityOS doing in the App Store upload logs,” tweeted iOS developer Rens Verhoeven. “This at least confirms [realityOS] 1) has its own OS & binaries and, 2) has a realityOS simulator,” noted another well-known developer, Steve Troughton-Smith.

However, the most recent rumor from Bloomberg suggests that the headset will be delayed until 2023 due to development issues like overheating. They’ll reportedly offer computing power on par with an M1 Mac and could be standalone without the need to tether, according to analyst Ming-chi Kuo.

If the references are real, they could suggest that developers are getting or will be getting access to the OS. As Troughton-Smith warned, however, they “could just be a remnant of somebody’s pull request from a fake account,” too — so take the leak with an appropriate dose of skepticism.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.

The operating system powering Apple’s rumored virtual or augmented reality headset may be called realityOS, MacRumors has reported. The term was spotted by multiple sources in recent GitHub open source code and App Store upload logs. “What is Apple’s realityOS doing in the App Store upload logs,” tweeted iOS developer Rens Verhoeven. “This at least confirms [realityOS] 1) has its own OS & binaries and, 2) has a realityOS simulator,” noted another well-known developer, Steve Troughton-Smith.

However, the most recent rumor from Bloomberg suggests that the headset will be delayed until 2023 due to development issues like overheating. They’ll reportedly offer computing power on par with an M1 Mac and could be standalone without the need to tether, according to analyst Ming-chi Kuo.

If the references are real, they could suggest that developers are getting or will be getting access to the OS. As Troughton-Smith warned, however, they “could just be a remnant of somebody’s pull request from a fake account,” too — so take the leak with an appropriate dose of skepticism.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared on Engadget.

A true “metaverse” may not yet exist, but that hasn’t stopped marketers from adopting the buzzword to promote their apps and games on mobile app stores. According to new data shared today by Sensor Tower, there are now 552 mobile apps that include the term “metaverse” in their apps’ titles or descriptions, in hopes of capturing consumer interest in this next evolution of the web. And many of the new additions were added in just the past few months, the firm notes.

Across all global apps ranked apps on the App Store and Google Play, a total of 86 apps added references to the “metaverse” to their title or description between November 2021 and January 2022, Sensor Tower’s data indicates.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

This time frame follows Facebook’s announcement of its corporate rebrand to “Meta,” and its plans to invest heavily in “metaverse” technologies over the coming decade. While Facebook, now Meta, never claimed to have already built the metaverse, the word soon began to be used much more casually to describe nearly any immersive online environment where people interact with one another as virtual selves. Startups began to describe themselves as metaverse companies. Gaming platform Roblox was touted as a metaverse frontrunner. Social-crypto platforms — which were really just MMORPGs with a heavy financial component — were also dubbed metaverses, prompting land rushes for metaverse real estate. And so on.

It seems that marketers didn’t much care about the actual technical requirements for the metaverse to exist — like the new industry standards that would need to be built to allow for movement between interoperable digital worlds, where all your friends, connections and virtual “stuff” comes with you.

After Facebook announced its metaverse efforts on October 28, the number of apps that referenced the word “metaverse” grew 66% month-over-month by November. As of the end of November, 29 apps had been updated to include the word, more than double the 11 apps in October.

The new firm also analyzed what sorts of apps were tapping into the metaverse trend. It found that many of the apps also referenced other popular tech terms alongside the word “metaverse” — like “crypto,” “NFTs,” “AR,” or “VR,” for example.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

Of these, “crypto” was the most common term to be spotted alongside “metaverse,” with 23% of apps (144 total apps) mentioning the term. That’s not surprising given that the web3 crypto community relies heavily on hype these days, and dubbing something the “metaverse” before it even exists is certainly the definition of hype. “NFTs” was the second-most popular term, appearing in 18% of the studied group, or 118 total apps. The terms “AR” and “VR” were found in 11% and 9% of the “metaverse” apps, respectively.

Image Credits: Sensor Tower

The term “metaverse” was also surprisingly used across a wide variety of apps, not just games and crypto finance apps.

However, mobile game publishers led the adoption of the keyword, as 107 apps in the Game category now reference the term, or 19% of the apps studied. The second-largest category where the term appeared was Finance, accounting for 101 of the “metaverse” apps. This was followed by Social (70 apps), Entertainment (57 apps), Books (37 apps), Lifestyle (33 apps), Tools (26 apps), Business (25 apps). Art and Design (13 apps) and Education (11 apps.)

As to whether or not the addition of the word “metaverse” to these apps is working to bring in users remains less clear. While it’s clearly been adopted to capitalize on users’ app store searches for the word, apps that succeed in this market are likely just offering better user experiences than those that aren’t.

A top VR web browser is closing down. Today, Mozilla announced it’s shutting down its Firefox Reality browser — the four-year-old browser built for use in virtual reality environments. The technology had allowed users to access the web from within their VR headset, doing things like visiting URLs, performing searches, and browsing both the 2D and 3D internet using your VR hand controllers, instead of a mouse.

Firefox Reality first launched in fall 2018 and has been available on Viveport, Oculus, Pico, and Hololens platforms through their various app stores. While capable of surfing the 2D web, the expectation was that users would largely use the new technology to browse and interact with the web’s 3D content, like 360-degree panoramic images and videos, 3D models, and WebVR games, for example. But in an announcement published today, Mozilla says the browser will be removed from the stores where it’s been available for download in the “coming weeks.”

Mozilla is instead directing users who still want to utilize a web browser in VR to Igalia’s upcoming open-source browser, Wolvic, which is based on Firefox Reality’s source code. This browser will be available for download starting next week, so users won’t have to go without — they’ll just have to make the switch.

Igalia touts its commitment to the XR space — XR being the umbrella term that covers both virtual reality and augmented reality and similar technologies. But its own announcement hints that the company felt Mozilla’s efforts on this front had stalled, noting how it’s excited to take up the experiment and “continue this work as a complete project.”

“We at Igalia believe the Web is important to the XR space in a large number of ways. XR systems which provide an immersive OS need web browsers to be part of that,” the announcement on the Igalia website states. “Entering a ‘reality’ without access to everything that already exists on the Web would be pretty terrible. Additionally, WebXR opens new avenues to navigate, share, and experience information driven from within the browser itself. Reimagining a browser for an immersive OS is new ground, and that newness means browser choice is currently limited,” it says.

Initially, the Wolvic browser will run on Oculus, HTC Vive Focus, Pico Interactive, Daydream, Huawei AR Glasses, and open-source Lynx devices. However, the browser that launches next week will still be in a “beta” phase as it works to transition some of the features Mozilla had previously provided over to its own browser.

Igalia has secured partial funding over the next two years to work on its browser project, but says it will need to find additional partners to be successful in building out a healthy ecosystem. It invites those interested in helping to reach out via email.

In explaining why it decided to close up Firefox Reality, Mozilla that while it does help develop new technologies, like WebVR and WebAR, it doesn’t always continue to host and incubate those technologies long-term. In some cases, it will work to find other organizations where its projects can continue, pointing to examples like WebAssembly, Rust, and Servo. Of course, as an organization still known best-known to mainstream consumers for its once hugely popular Firefox web browser, it’s telling that it’s turning over the future of its latest browser technology to another company to run.

Consumers worldwide have downloaded Meta’s Oculus app, the mobile companion for Oculus VR devices including the Quest 2, roughly 2 million times globally since Christmas Day, according to new data from third-party app intelligence firms, Apptopia and Sensor Tower. Already, had been some indication that the Quest 2 was a popular holiday gift after the Oculus app shot to the top of the Apple App Store for the first time ever on Christmas Day and became the most popular free app on Google Play in the U.S., as well.

During the week of Christmas in the U.S. (Dec. 23-Dec. 29), adoption of the Oculus app jumped up by 517% week-over-week to reach 1.5 million installs, Sensor Tower’s data indicates.

In the week that followed, the firm saw those installs drop 77% to 345,000 from Dec. 30 through Jan. 5, but this figure is still higher than the week before Christmas 2021 by 42%. And it’s likely that these more recent downloads still include those who recently received a new Oculus device for the holidays, but hadn’t gotten around to setting it up yet.

While the U.S. accounted for the majority of the post-Christmas installs, app intelligence firms estimate that, in total, the app has seen around 2 million global installs from Christmas Day through the present across the App Store and Google Play combined.

Sensor Tower’s estimate is a bit more conservative on this front, as the firm said the app saw around 1.8 million installs globally from Dec. 31, 2021 through Jan. 5, 2022. Meanwhile, Apptopia reports the Oculus app was downloaded 2.189 million times worldwide from Christmas through the present day. Of those 2 million-plus installs, around 79% (or 1.727 million) were attributed to U.S. consumers, it noted.

Image Credits: Apptopia’s earlier data shows a Christmas 2021 surge

To put these numbers in a broader perspective, the app’s 2021 holiday install figures are closer to the total number of yearly downloads the app had seen in its earlier days.

Launched in April 2018, the Oculus app saw 1.2 million downloads in its first year on the market, then 2.4 million downloads in 2019. Things picked up in 2020, when 4.4 million global consumers installed the app, according to Apptopia’s data. In 2021, the Oculus app benefitted from the Quest 2’s fall 2020 launch and jumped to 10.62 million installs. The U.S. accounted for 7.218 million of those installs, or 68%.

Sensor Tower’s data is still a bit more conservative here, finding the app had been downloaded a little over 8 million times worldwide in 2021 across the App Store and Google Play, not 10.6 million.

But regardless of which numbers are closer to accuracy, both firms agree that in just a handful of days since Christmas, the Oculus app has gained somewhere in the ballpark of 2 million more downloads.

Meta did not yet reply to a request for comment on the third-party estimates, but the most recent Quest 2 adoption figures are from Qualcomm, whose chipset powers the new VR devices. The company said in Nov. 2021 that Meta had shipped 10 million Quest 2 units to date.

The Oculus app works with the company’s legacy products (Rift and Rift S), but these new downloads aren’t likely for discontinued products, but rather the Quest 2. Meta first began shipping the Quest 2 in October 2020, which means it has over a full year under its belt as the company’s flagship device — one meant to make VR adoption more affordable at its $299 entry-level price point. And after Facebook announced its big rebrand to Meta last year and detailed its plans for the “metaverse,” more consumers may have found themselves interested in exploring VR for the first time, contributing to the recent install growth.

Although app downloads aren’t generally a proxy for real-world adoption, in Oculus’ case they can help paint a picture as to how many consumers may have recently bought — or were gifted — a new Oculus VR device. The app allows consumers to download new VR apps and games and find friends to connect with in VR, so it’s something most Quest 2 owners will choose to install.

As of Jan. 5, the Oculus app has dropped in the U.S. App Store rankings, which take into account both installs and velocity, among other factors. It’s now No. 111 Overall but a respectable No. 10 in the Entertainment category where it’s listed.

In addition, Apptopia reports the app is seeing decent engagement from its new users. The firm estimates the Oculus app has 2.41 million daily active users — above previous levels. This figure indicates that users didn’t just set up the app once then abandon it, but are still actively exploring the VR world.

It was way back in 2017 that the company that became Ultraleap (Ultrahaptics, as weas) demonstrated at TechCrunch Disrupt a technology that pioneered ultrasound to replicate the sense of touch. The impressive ‘Star Wars’ demonstration took the crowd by storm.

It was quite the demo (see the video below). The underlying technology was based on post-graduate research from inventor – and still CEO – Tom Carter. Ultrahaptics went on to raise $23 million, begin to interest car companies, and later absorb the much-hyped Leap Motion, which, it turns out, was a match made in heaven, by uniting both hand tracking and mid-air haptics.

Ultraleap has now raised an $82 million (£60 million) Series D funding, led by a combination of Tencent, British Patient Capital’s ‘Future Fund: Breakthrough’, and CMB International. Also participating were existing shareholders Mayfair Equity Partners and IP Group plc.

Commenting, Tom Carter, Ultraleap CEO, said recent chatter about the VR-based “Metaverse” from companies like Facebook, as well as the shift to touchless interfaces brought about by the pandemic, had helped its fund-raising.

“The metaverse concept is not new to Ultraleap,” he said. “It has always been our mission to remove boundaries between physical and digital worlds. The pandemic has accelerated the rise of the term as more people now understand the power of enhancing the physical world with digital elements. For Ultraleap, this new era is not constrained to VR headsets. Like the internet, it is a reality we will interact with, in all parts of life: at home, in the office, in cars, or out in public. Our aim with this Series D raise is to accelerate the transition to the primary interface – your hands – because there are no physical controllers, buttons or touchscreens in anyone’s vision of the metaverse.”

Ultraleap’s fifth-generation hand tracking platform, dubbed Gemini, is clearly heading towards a number of devices. It’s already built into multiple platforms, camera systems, and third-party hardware including Qualcomm’s Snapdragon XR2 chipset and Varjo’s VR-3 and XR-3 headsets.

Ultraleap’s plan is to take Gemini to different operating systems, increase investment in tooling / R&D and let developers run away with their imaginations on how to apply the technology.

Of course, one of the key drivers of this touchless technology is of course The Great Pandemic. Like, who wants to touch anything anymore, right?!

Thus, companies like PepsiCo and Lego are already using Ultraleap’s technology in public interfaces.

And as was hinted at back in 2017, automakers are looking to make the ‘in-cabin experience’ a real thing. So Ultraleap is already working with DS Automobiles and Hosiden on new mid-air haptics experiences.

Carter expanded on these moves on a call, explaining that the potential for user interfaces that work inside VR-based metaverses are the vision for Ultraleap’s technology: “Admittedly, the metaverse is a very buzzy thing at the moment, but it really does describe the thing that we’ve been working towards: removing the barriers between humans and virtual content.”

“We’ve raised this round to help transition everyone towards that optimum interface of your hands, across all of the markets that we target. So on XR, we’ve launched Gemini, and in the last few weeks, a new generation of hand tracking, which is getting super rave reviews. It’s really now time to scale out-of-home. Pepsi’s deployment had 85% user preference and parity with touchscreens in terms of completion times for putting your orders through.”

Then there’s automotive. He said: “UX is the new horsepower’. We’re still driving, but we are moving towards being much more focused on the experience within the cabin… whether you’re working, working, being entertained, or other sorts of similarly Metaverse-like activities within your car.”

He said it turns out that there’s a very big safety benefit in using these mid-air interfaces over trying to use a touchscreen, where you have to take your eyes off the road: “It reduces the mental load on the driver by about 20%, by reducing the number of glances off the road that the driver takes. Transitioning to that interface makes the driving experience safer. And then once you have that interface and people are used to interacting in this way, it makes the transition to the future world easier.”

Here’s the 2017 demonstration:

Qualcomm today launched a new developer platform for building head-worn augmented reality experiences: the Snapdragon Spaces XR Developer Platform. The only supported hardware for the platform is currently Lenovo’s ThinkReality A3 smart glasses (paired with a Motorola phone), but it will expand to include hardware from Oppo and Xiaomi in the first half of 2022.

To build out the software ecosystem, Qualcomm lined up a wide range of partners, including Epic Games’s Unreal Engine, Niantic’s Lightship platform, Unity, Viacom CBS and others. Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile U.S. are also partnering with Qualcomm to support startups that use Snapdragon Spaces through the hubraum program.

Image Credits: Qualcomm

For now, only a small number of developers will have access to the program. These currently include the likes of Felix & Paul Studios, holo|one, Overlay, Scope AR, TRIPP, Tiny Rebel Games, NZXR, forwARdgame, Resolution Games and TriggerGlobal. It plans to make the platform generally available in the spring of next year.

The company also today announced that it has acquired “the team and certain technology assets from HINS SAS and its wholly owned subsidiary, Clay AIR, Inc.” for its hand tracking and gesture recognition solutions. This is in addition to Qualcomm’s acquisition of Wikitude in 2019, another move that helped it jumpstart its AR efforts.

“Dating back to 2007, we had R&D programs, looking into augmented reality with algorithms like VIO [visual-inertial odometry] on smartphones,” said Hugo Swart, Qualcomm’s vice president and GM of XR, in a press briefing ahead of today’s announcement. “We enabled, through the last decade, devices like ODG. In 2014, we created new chips dedicated to virtual reality and augmented reality — and we are here for the long run. We know that we’re not there — it’s still going to require investment until we get to the holy grail of AR glasses that can do both fully immersive and augmented experiences.”

Image Credits: Qualcomm

Today’s platform is able to support features like local anchors and persistence, hand tracking, object recognition and tracking, plane detection, occlusion spatial mapping and meshing.

With this platform, Qualcomm wants to lower the barriers for developers to build AR experiences. They will get access to documentation, sample code, tutorial and additional tooling to quickly build basic AR applications. To further help companies who want to build for this ecosystem, Qualcomm is also opening up an additional program, dubbed Pathfinder. With this, they will get early access software tools and hardware development kits, additional funding for their projects and co-marketing and promotion from Qualcomm.

Tinder has already undergone a big revamp with its recent launch of “Explore,” a new section inside the app that will enable more interactive experiences, including the second “Swipe Night” series, real-time chat, interest-based matching, and more. Now, parent company Match Group is detailing its longer-term vision for Tinder and Explore, which will expand to include exclusive, shared, and live experiences and a virtual goods-based economy, supported by Tinder’s new in-app currency, Tinder Coins. In addition, Match spoke today about its broader plans for a dating “metaverse,” and avatar-based virtual experiences that may later roll out to apps across its portfolio, including Tinder.

In terms of the virtual economy, the first phase of its development includes Tinder Coins, which are already being tested in several markets, including a few countries in Europe, Match said.

Next year, Tinder Coins will become available to global users to make in-app purchases of Tinder’s a la carte products, like Boost and Super Like — tools aimed at helping online daters get more matches. They’ll also be used for new pay-as-you-go products that were previously only available with a subscription, like the See Who Likes You feature. And they’ll be used to incentivize certain behaviors on the app, like encouraging members to verify their profiles or add videos to their bio, for example.

Image Credits: Match Group

Longer-term, however, Tinder will evolve its app to include virtual goods and a trading ecosystem, which is being planned for 2022 and beyond. This strategic initiative was detailed during Tinder parent company Match Group’s Q3 earnings, including in its Shareholder Letter and on its earnings call with investors on Wednesday morning.

Across its dating app portfolio, Match Group had reported Q3 revenue of $802 million, up 25% year-over-year, and 16.3 million paid subscribers, up 16%. But the company was transparent about the fact that the Covid pandemic has had an impact on its business — lockdowns early in the pandemic had forced a pivot towards virtual experiences. And now, some users are still less inclined to meet in-person, compared with before the pandemic. In addition, citing lingering Covid effects in Asia, Match Group forecasted weaker Q4 growth than expected with $810-$820 million in revenue instead of the analyst forecast of $838 million.

To address this changing market for online dating, Tinder has leaned into virtual experiences that take place inside the app, instead of only pushing people to get offline for connections. That’s led to the launch of Tinder Explore, and now, it’s driving plans for the forthcoming virtual goods-based economy Tinder has in the works.

Image Credits: Tinder

According to Match Group CEO Shar Dubey, speaking to investors on today’s call, Tinder’s virtual goods will “help users with both self-expression as well as the ability to stand out — particularly in a one-to-many surface area that ‘Explore’ experiences will enable,” she said. “And so the way we envision virtual goods is that it’s something users will be able to collect, as well as give and gift to others.”

Dubey said Tinder in 2022 would be working to design the virtual goods, categorize them, create their value structure, and determine where to best showcase the items on users’ Tinder profiles. This will involve testing virtual goods then iterating and refining the product further, based on those tests. Despite the work that still needs to be done, the exec was optimistic about this plan.

“If we get this right, I do think this could be a multi-year revenue vector for Tinder which doesn’t exist today,” she said.

In addition to developing a virtual goods economy inside Tinder, Match Group also spoke to its larger plans for leveraging Hyperconnect, the Seoul-based social app maker it acquired for $1.73 billion earlier in 2021. So far, Hyperconnect has not performed as well as expected, in part due to Covid and in part due to other issues — including marketing performance and product delays, the company admitted.

But Match still believes in Hyperconnect’s long-term value to its business, Dubey said.

She talked specifically about Hyperconnect’s test of an avatar-based dating app and “metaverse” experience called Single Town, where users interact using real-time audio and meet each other in virtual spaces, like a bar, where they have live audio conversations. Users can express interest in one another in the virtual world, then choose to connect privately to continue their conversations.

“It is metaverse experiences coming to life in a way that is transformative to how people meet and get to know each other on a dating or social discovery platform, and is much more akin to how people interact in the real world,” Dubey said of the test.

This type of interactivity is something Match Group eventually wants to leverage across its portfolio, the company said.

“This next phase of dating apps, in particular, is going to be all about richer, more organic, and more akin to real-life ways of discovering, meeting, and getting to know people. Technology is finally getting there. And this underlying technology platform Hyperconnect has built that powers Single Town has been built in a way that it can be leveraged by other platforms easily,” Dubey noted, but without naming which Match-owned apps she had in mind.

However, it seems a metaverse-like platform for dating could later tie into something like Tinder’s virtual goods economy, though the company didn’t state this was the plan. But based on current social trends, it’s obvious how a dating app’s users could one day buy items to accessorize their avatar or buy gifts for other users, which are purchased with virtual currency — much like in other “metaverse” platforms, like Roblox, Fortnite, or withing Meta’s (Facebook’s) Horizon.

In its Shareholder Letter, Match Group only hinted towards the possibilities for this dating metaverse and the experiences it creates.

“This new experience provides a glimpse into how metaverse experiences could be applicable to dating and it is the sort of innovation that will help us evolve our portfolio as we enter the next phase of dating,” the letter stated.

“We’re still very optimistic about the long-term prospects for Hyperconnect,” explained Match Group CFO and COO Gary Swidler, on the call. “It can contribute extremely significantly to the long-term growth of the overall Match Group. There’s many ways that we can do that. We think that we can leverage video, audio, A.I. capabilities that they’ve got, things in moderation, and safety. There’s a number of things that we’re working very hard at leveraging,” he continued.

“The new metaverse elements and the experience that we’re seeing in that beta test — that is something that potentially we can build into either standalone app and/or potentially leverage that user experience into some of our apps in the portfolio,” Swidler said.

Microsoft wants a piece of the metaverse, too, so at its Ignite conference today, the company announced 3D avatars for those Teams meetings where you don’t want to be on camera. Those animated personalized avatars are part of what Microsoft calls ‘Mesh for Teams,’ which combines the company’s Mesh platform (not to be confused with Windows Live Mesh) for powering shared experiences in virtual reality, augmented reality and elsewhere, with Teams and its built-in productivity tools. It’s still the same meetings that should’ve been an email, but different.

To access Mesh for Teams, you will be able use anything from a smartphone to a VR headset or a HoloLens. Microsoft is quite open about the fact that this is its metaverse play for productivity, “designed to make online meetings more personal, engaging and fun,” Microsoft’s John Roach writes in today’s announcement. “It’s also a gateway to the metaverse — a persistent digital world that is inhabited by digital twins of people, places and things. Think of the metaverse as a new version — or a new vision  — of the internet, one where people gather to communicate, collaborate and share with personal virtual presence on any device.”

In that vision, you’re still having meetings, but they will be more fun now, because of the metaverse. Or something like that.

Image Credits: Microsoft

“As a company whose focus is on productivity, on knowledge workers, it’s something that customers are really asking us for, and it’s coupled with the vision of mixed reality that we’ve been working on for 12 years. It’s all coming together,” said always enthusiastic Microsoft Technical Fellow Alex Kipman.

For now, for most users, Mesh won’t be much more than these 3D personalized avatars that mimic your own speech, but not movements. Microsoft says businesses can also create their own spaces — or metaverses, because that’s the term we use now — within Teams, where people can virtually mingle and collaborate.

“There will be a feeling of presence even though it’s as simple as being able to take your audio and manifest that as facial expressions. That’s the first release,” wrote Katie Kelly, a principal project manager at Microsoft working on Mesh for Teams. “The ambition is to closely follow that with Microsoft’s plethora of AI technologies so that we can use the camera to insinuate where your mouth is and mimic your head and facial movements.”

Accenture has been testing some of this together with Microsoft. The company built a virtual campus for its employees to “gather for coffees, presentations, parties and other events.” It’s also using it to onboard new employees. Accenture apparently hires 100,000 people each year. At 600,000 employees, I’m not sure the metaverse is going to help with that turnover rate, but they are high-paid consultants, so they probably know best.

Facebook (aka “Meta”) CEO Mark Zuckerberg today took several thinly veiled shots at Apple and the overall app ecosystem when detailing his plans for the metaverse during today’s keynote speech at the company’s Facebook Connect 2021 event. Specifically, he called out app platforms and their associated fees for “stifling innovation,” while simultaneously justifying Facebook’s plans to keep some of its own fees higher as it further invests in its burgeoning VR ecosystem and its Oculus Quest Store.

His statements follow Apple’s recent app privacy changes that have taken a toll on Facebook’s ads business. With the release of App Tracking Transparency, Apple now allows consumers to stop apps from tracking them across other apps and websites. But this change has dragged down Facebook’s revenue, the company has admitted.

Now, Facebook sees the potential in building out its own app platform with Oculus to create a new stream of revenue — one where it becomes the platform that profits, instead of the developer having to pay the commissions. And one where its business can’t be destroyed at the whims of another company’s shift in strategy.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that it’s time to make this change, saying that he’s learned in recent years that “building products isn’t enough.”

“We also need to help build ecosystems so that millions of people can have a stake in the future can be rewarded for their work and benefit as the tide rises — not just as consumers, but as creators and developers,” he said. “This period has also been humbling, because as big of a company as we are, we’ve also learned what it is like to build for other platforms. And living under their rules has profoundly shaped my views on the tech industry,” Zuckerberg continued.

“Most of all, I’ve come to believe that the lack of choice and high fees are stifling innovation, stopping people from building new things, and holding back the entire internet economy,” he added.

These comments seem directly pointed at Apple and Google, on whose platforms Facebook’s core products largely reside. Facebook has to pay fees on in-app purchases to the app stores — including when users subscribe to creators, buy badges, or tip streamers directly, for example. While both Apple and Google have been bringing their commissions down for smaller businesses, media providers, and subscription apps, the standard split is still 70/30 (platform/developer).

App Store rules have also prevented Facebook from building out other products where it could have increased revenues — as with its newer gaming service.

The company slammed Apple’s policies last year as it launched Facebook Gaming on iOS without games, for example. Apple doesn’t allow apps that contain other apps or games, as that would cut into its own ability to generate revenues from third-party developers. So instead of being able to play mini-games as on Android, Facebook Gaming iOS users could only watch streams.

However, the real concern for Facebook’s future is one where its ad revenues are threatened by platform policy changes out of its control.

Those revenues over the years have allowed Facebook to invest in other sectors, in addition to keeping its apps free, Zuckerberg noted.

“We offer our creator and commerce tools either at cost or with modest fees to enable as much creation and commerce as possible. And it’s worked. Billions of people love our products,” he touted. “We have hundreds of millions of businesses on our platform.”

The company now plans to take the same approach to build its metaverse ecosystem — by either subsidizing devices or selling them at cost, to make them more broadly available to consumers, Zuckerberg said. And unlike with Apple’s App Store, Facebook says it plans to support sideloading and linking to PCs to provide consumers and developers with choice, instead of locking them into its platform. (Of course, many developers will choose to launch on the Quest Store for discovery’s sake, which is why Facebook knows it can make this promise.)

He also said that Facebook would keep developer and creator service fees low, when possible. However, Zuckerberg — sketching out the company’s next business model — warned that won’t always be the case. Given the size of its investment in this new ecosystem, some fees would remain higher, he said.

“To keep investing in this future, we’ll need to keep some fees higher for some period to make sure that we don’t lose too much money on this program overall,” Zuckerberg explained. “After all, while a growing number of developers are already profitable, we expect to invest many billions of dollars for years to come before the metaverse reaches scale. Our hope, though, is that if we all work at it that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach a billion people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.”

In other words, Facebook’s plan to become more like Apple by tapping into developer revenues at scale and making its own rules.

Last year we covered Adtech startup Admix’s $7 million Series A funding. The London-based company brings ads to games, e-sports, virtual reality, and augmented reality. In-game advertising at scale, where advertisers can bid programmatically through traditional ad-buying platforms, rather than relying on an ad agency model, remains an enormous area, largely under-exploited.

Today Admix is doubling down on this very model, with a $25 million Series B round to scale up its ‘In-Play’ solution and prep it for new platforms like metaverses – the likes of Facebook and others are clearly building.

The new raise brings Admix’s total funding to USD $37 million.

The round was co-led by Elefund and DIP capital. Also participating is Force Over Mass, Notion Capital, Speedinvest, Rocket Capital, Colopl Next, Sure Valley Ventures, and Sidedoor Ventures as well as growth investor Kuvi Capital and angels from the gaming industry.

Samuel Huber, CEO and Co-founder at Admix, commented:“We see the internet entering a new stage: Web 3.0 or the metaverse, characterized by real-time 3D interactions and a new creator economy, spearheaded by the video games industry… While many players in our industry are essentially agencies, Admix is building critical infrastructure for creators to monetize their content in the best way possible.”

Serik Kaldykulov, Founder and Managing Partner at Elefund, commented: “Sam and Joe are exactly the type of founders we want to work with at Elefund. They created Admix and In-Play with their incredible vision for the future of digital gaming, and we believe that they will continue to play a significant role in shaping how consumers and businesses exist and interact in what the world will come to know as the metaverse.”

Elaborating, Huber told me that companies in the same space include Bidstack, Adverty, Anzu and Frameplay. However, he said the difference with these entities is that Admix is “building infrastructure to automate the process and serve non-intrusive ads to the right user in the right game at the right time, using data. This tech means scalability (across 300+ games and hundred of advertisers we worked with in the last 2 years, 90% are self onboarded) and network effects defensibility, which is why VCs are betting on us to dominate the category.”

Admix recently signed deals for In-Play campaigns with Calvin Klein, Schuh, Movember, and Sky.