Facebook expecting to fight Apple for metaverse dominance

As the race to realize the metaverse kicks off, Mark Zuckerberg told employees that Meta would be competing directly with Apple when it comes to creating AR and VR platforms.

In June, a Meta employee asked how Apple's absence from the Metaverse Standards Forum would influence Meta's ecosystem.

Zuckerberg told employees that Meta would be competing against Apple to determine "what direction the internet should go in," according to a recording of an internal meeting obtained by The Verge.

Zuckerberg also believes that Apple will likely want to tightly control the experience because "they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better consumer experience"

The position puts Apple diametrically opposed to Meta, which already allows side loading on its Quest headset. Zuckerberg calls this a "deep, philosophical competition about what direction the internet should go in."

He also notes that he's unsure whether an open or closed ecosystem would be better and that Apple's strategy may prove more beneficial than Meta's open ecosystem. However, he states that Meta's goal is to get its hardware into the hands of as many people as possible.

The goal is to get "a billion people into the metaverse doing hundreds of dollars a piece in digital commerce by the end of the decade," providing the same revenue as Meta's current ad business. That number is about what Apple makes per customer on the App Store annually now.

While Apple has not officially announced any augmented or virtual reality hardware Apple CEO Tim Cook has expressed interest in augmented reality.

Apple has long been rumored to be developing several different AR and VR devices, including a high-end Apple VR visor that could focus on virtual reality and gaming. Apple is also thought to be working on a smaller and lighter "Apple Glass" wearable that could be a companion to an iPhone.