Is Meta this bad of a VR business partner? This developer says so and he's suing

Here’s the deal: the best VR headsets are all impressive in their own right, but what would that matter if there weren’t awesome experiences that could let you feel that power? I mean, hardware is important, but the soul of the machine is software.

As such, a huge part of getting AR and VR to become way more widely adopted — which is a challenge that the industry has been facing since forever now — is getting more developers on board and getting their creative juices flowing, but in XR.

But sometimes that simply doesn’t work out. And despite Meta being not only a trendsetter, but also an industry-leader when it comes to the VR industry, it’s also a company that hasn’t had the best track record when it comes to treating developers right.

Because, allegedly, this dev lost millions of dollars due to Meta’s… abrupt behavior.


So, the dev in our story is called Elijah and Elijah is suing Meta for millions of dollars for damages, missed opportunities and because he believes that what happened was unfair. What happened then?

Well, since this is only one side of the story — and we’re likely to never hear the other side’s perspective outside of court — you might want to keep an open mind.

So, TL;DR: Elijah worked hard to make this awesome yoga app for VR called AEI Fitness for Meta Quest. It supported tons of features too, like avatars, virtual instructors and even covered other topics like Pilates or mindfulness.

Meta was supposed to promote AEI Fitness during Meta Connect 2032 — kind of the biggest online event related to XR tech and also the one during which the Quest 3 was launched — but, basically, the company didn’t.

And that was important, because Elijah was kind of counting on that exposure and based on his estimations, it would’ve boosted his app to the top of the charts. Seemingly as a result, Elijah then moved on to talking to Apple and Pico to launch his app on their platforms.

And Meta? Meta didn’t like that. So the company pulled the rug on Elijah and banned him from its ecosystem.

Unfair much?

And this isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Virtual Desktop is one of the biggest VR apps on the market, available on numerous different platforms. Its developer, Guy Godin, has blamed Meta in the past for preventing him from bringing more features to his app, just because Meta was planning to make its own versions of the same features.