Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed his company is competing with Apple in developing the metaverse. According to him, Meta and Apple are in a very deep philosophical competition.
Speaking with Meta employees earlier this month, Zuckerberg said his company is competing with Apple to determine the "direction of the internet" going forward. He said Meta would be a cheaper and more open alternative to Apple.
"This is a competition of philosophy and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating, they can build a better consumer experience," Zuckerberg said, as quoted by The Verge, Wednesday (27/7/2022).
"And we believe that there is a lot to be done in specialization across companies, and that it will allow a much larger ecosystem to exist."
Since changing Facebook's name to Meta, Zuckerberg has continued to champion the metaverse and the concept of interoperability. Recently, Meta together with Microsoft, Epic Games, and others founded the Metaverse Open Standards Group to create an open metaverse protocol.
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Apple was, of course, absent from the group, and Zuckerberg wasn't surprised to see the iPhone maker not joining. To Meta employees, Zuckerberg explained Apple's approach to building a closed hardware and software ecosystem might work for the iPhone, but might not work for building a metaverse.
Apple itself has long been rumored to be releasing a headset for augmented and virtual reality, one of the devices needed to explore the metaverse. Apple CEO Tim Cook has expressed interest in AR several times, but has remained tight-lipped about rumors of Apple's AR and VR headsets.
If Apple does release AR and VR headsets, Zuckerberg says he wants to position Meta as Android against Apple's iOS. Indeed, there are similarities between Meta and Android, currently the Quest headset allows users to sideload applications that are not available in the VR Meta app store.
Apple and Meta have never competed directly, unlike the competition between Apple and Google. But Apple indirectly became the 'enemy' of Meta after its latest privacy policy made Meta lose billions of dollars from ad revenue on iOS.