Jaeden Schafer

I think Meta's long-term interest was never just hardware.

They were a lot more focused on the economics of running their own platform, whether that was apps or games.

And they're kind of looking at this as a way to escape from Apple and Google's grip on mobile app distribution.

That was, I think, why they're putting so much money and really trying for this whole thing.

During Facebook Connect back in 2021, Zuckerberg was openly criticizing the Apple-Google duopoly.

He said that building under the rules had been really, quote unquote, humbling and that higher fees were stifling innovation.

He said that he wanted the metaverse to reach a billion users within a decade and generate hundreds of billions of dollars in digital commerce.

There's a bunch of consulting firms.

I think McKinsey was one of them.

There was some banks, Citi, all of those were saying like, yeah, we expect to see the same kind of thing.

They were kind of forecasting these multi-trillion dollar metaverse economies by 2030.

It seems like they were maybe drinking the Kool-Aid a little bit too much because we never even got close to that.

I think Meta's kind of, they definitely had like a big dream, but the adoption was lagging really bad.

So even though the company didn't disclose any kind of detailed metrics from its VR app store, mostly I think because this would make them look bad,

The estimates give us kind of a rough idea.

So Apptopia data suggests that MetaHorizon app has been downloaded about 60 million times globally since 2018.

So that's about 40 million downloads in the US.

I think they did see some growth in engagement.

They had an average daily sessions per user, which was at like

3.49% in early 2023, that went up to 4.9% by January of 2026.