Meta issued the Quest v77 upgrade with problems, according to the company’s CTO, despite his vow to increase quality control.
Last month, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth stated that the business was “taking seriously” developer complaints about OS performance regressions, undocumented and misguided modifications, and bugs. He stated that Meta was “spending time on” the issue and “doing the work” to resolve it.
“As always, we value feedback from developers and take it carefully. “It is our responsibility; these are our mistakes, and we will correct them,” Bosworth stated at the time.
However, Meta began sending out v77 approximately three weeks ago, and developers have discovered even more flaws in this current edition. To be clear, we are not talking to issues with the new Navigator system interface. These problems are at the heart of the OS experience.
Guy Godin, the developer of Virtual Desktop, publicly criticized the choice to release v77 in an X thread. He described how issues he reported in the Public Test Channel (PTC) build, such as audio crackling, audio cutting off when switching to passthrough, VP8 video decoding not working, and MediaCodec issues, persisted in the “stable” build.
Godin grumbled, “Good job ignoring all of the reports during PTC and pushing your update anyway”. Multiple other developers tell they’re experiencing similar issues.
In an ask-me-anything (AMA) session on his Instagram page, Bosworth was asked why users on “the bird app,” which refers to Twitter (now X), were “mad at” him.
Bosworth explained that it was “for good reason, I’m sorry to say.”
“Our quality control hasn’t been where we need it to be,” he admitted, citing unnamed reasons for having to deliver an update with issues to millions of headsets:
“We saw these concerns at PTC. We had to roll for reasons I don’t understand.
People ask, “How could you do it!?” However, these issues do not affect a large number of people. They do have an impact on developers, which I care deeply about, as well as a certain group of people.
We are working on the fixes. Some of them require firmware updates from Qualcomm, so we’re going through the process there.
We are working on this with great haste. We are not pleased about that. There are a number of reasons why we have to proceed, and it’s a calculated decision with some rewards and drawbacks. But we shouldn’t be in a position to make that decision since we should have far better quality control sooner.
It is a process. We are working on it. My dedication to that has not wavered at all.”
