Meta’s CTO, Andrew Bosworth, posted on Instagram that the company will not end VR support for Horizon Worlds, a day after the announcement of the closure of Horizon Worlds on Meta Quest.
It was in the Instagram Stories section that Bosworth responded to an internet user that “We decided, today, that we will keep Horizon Worlds running in VR.” This update was confirmed by Meta to TechCrunch.
Meta had revealed its intention to discontinue support for the metaverse social application on its Quest virtual reality headsets, an announcement that was made official two days ago, ending a chapter that the company once considered fundamental to VR socialization and its strategy.
Meta’s investment did not find a match in user interest, who rarely sought to interact in Virtual Reality environments. Therefore, it was not surprising that the Horizon Worlds platform limited its support to web and mobile.
What may have been surprising was the new decision and the speed of its announcement, keeping Horizon Worlds accessible via Quest. Meta’s black hole in its virtual reality area is $73 billion in size and has a name: Reality Labs. The company has invested in augmented reality products, such as smart glasses, but also in artificial intelligence, now opting to separate the VR area from the AI area.
According to IDC, a technology market intelligence company, sales of Meta’s Quest headset fell 16% year-over-year from 2024 to 2025, making it unlikely that this hardware will significantly compete with smartphones. Meta isn’t the only one struggling to make virtual reality appealing—Apple had to reduce production of its $3,500 Vision Pro headset due to low demand.
Meta responded to this decline with significant cuts in its Reality Labs division in January, affecting more than 1,500 employees and closing several game studios. There are rumors that Meta is considering a new round of layoffs, even more significant, which could impact 20% of the company.
Despite Meta maintaining support for Horizon Worlds on the Quest headset, its priority is the mobile experience, as Bosworth explained in a podcast with journalist Alex Heath.
“There’s a much larger audience on mobile devices, and the app is getting a very positive reception on this platform,” said Bosworth. According to him, nowadays Meta has the job of “building everything twice—once for smartphone and once for virtual reality. There’s a very simple way to increase development speed, which is simply to let them develop for mobile devices.”
In practice, and according to data from the mobile intelligence company Appfigures, the mobile version of Horizon Worlds has had a total of 45 million downloads worldwide, considering iOS and Google Play, with 1.5 million downloads so far in 2026.
Despite a 53% increase compared to the previous year, when the Horizon Worlds app had approximately 983,000 downloads at this same time, it is estimated that consumers spent only US$1.1 million on the app.
