Is Apple planning another Big ‘F-U’ to Meta’s Metaverse by fully supporting WebXR Open Standards?
Recently Facebook has been hurting and hurting badly. Their market cap dropped more than any other company in history, totaling more than $232 Billion, and almost $400 Billion since its peak of $1T in August of 2021. Many are attributing the decline to reduced future earnings growth for Facebook. Facebook has claimed that Apple’s changes (for improved privacy) created a revenue headwind to future growth. Facebook’s growth largely depends on user growth and revenue per user growth, which largely depends on microtargeting its users by setting cookies that tell advertisers a user’s interests in gory details. Apple put a stop to microtargeting iPhone, iPad, and Safari users.
A war has been brewing between Apple and Facebook since it’s been determined that foreign governments have leveraged Facebook’s advertising model to levy an information war on the US. Adding to the conflict, Facebook knew from its own research that its social networking apps cause emotional harm to young teens ( and probably adults too ). See, Facebook leverages engagement at all costs to get users back to the site to sell more ads. One way to drive engagement is to find content that enrages you. Facebook makes money off this pattern and doesn’t have to, but it does.
Apple, by comparison, doesn’t make money off of advertising. They don’t resell your data; they sell expensive hardware and earn a profit there. Assuming you can afford an Apple device, their incentives are to build trust with you, so you keep buying hardware and their services.
Jaron Lanier, a tech visionary and futurist, has discussed the trend led by Facebook at great length. He has a great and short TED talk about how the internet and social media turned angry. He was a visionary for the open and libre web before Facebook, and even before the modern web, he predicted the future of VR. Recently, he’s been trying to change the minds of Silicon Valley on how to fix the web and return to its “utopian roots.”
He talks about how social media sites today can gain “easy” engagement by getting you to act by creating a cycle of rage rather than love. He talks about why that is a fundamentally easier thing to do. It’s in part our primitive lizard brain being high-jacked and drudged into paying attention to perceived threats. Other emotions take more time and effort and use our higher brain.
It’s the same reason why action and horror movies are more “captivating” than slow love dramas or why you can’t look away from a train wreck. He advocates that “we can change this; we can make it better.”
If you are looking for more detail on Jaron’s thoughts, here is a list of books to read later:
- You Are Not a Gadget (2010)
- Who Owns the Future? (2013)
- Dawn of the New Everything (2017)
- Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Account Right Now (2018)
- An Easter Egg Video of Jaron discussing VR in the 1990s and a device called the iPhone. (I wonder if Apple got the idea from him )
In Facebook’s 2021 Q4 Report, Facebook advised that the new privacy measures from Apple will result in a $10 Billion revenue hit in 2022. And then, in its 2022 Q1 report, Facebook acknowledged that its daily active users dropped and that it was planning on dumping $10 B into its “Metaverse” bet. Facebook executives might know they are at “Peak Facebook” and are betting big on Facebook being able to pivot into VR. They are betting so big that Facebook even changed its name to Meta Inc.
Facebook has made a name for itself in VR by buying the Oculus brand and company and fully supporting VR/AR research( or XR if you combine them). Tech companies are betting big on XR because it’s seen as the device to replace your mobile phone and one day add a layer of technology between you and nearly everything you do — thus making your phone obsolete. If you find that creepy, it definitely could be in the wrong hands, and Facebook doesn’t have a good track record. ( on top of that, VR will have eye tracking, and AI will be able to infer unconscious interests, too, not just the ones you click “like” on. Facebook will use this to generate ad revenue, and companies like Apple won’t need to sell your ‘look/gaze data’)
In 2021, Apple generated $365 Billion in revenue, with 52% from iPhone sales alone. So, Apple has a real dog in this fight. Apple knows Facebook is an aggressive win-at-all-costs sort of company, so why should Apple hold back against a company that is committing 10s of Billions of dollars in XR in hopes of taking 80%+ of the future XR market?
But here is where it gets interesting. Maybe for Apple, a win for privacy, your hardware dollars, and the open web are all on the same side. Tim Cook has privately said recently that Apple isn’t going to build the “metaverse” or something similar. — according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
I can’t think of a bigger F-U to Facebook / Meta’s fledgling App Store than to support the open web, and … Apple had done it before when they launched the iPhone!
When the Apple iPhone launched, it didn’t have an App Store. The phone had a few Apple Apps and a web browser that supported Advanced and Prototype Web Standards. I had just moved to Silicon Valley to work at a Social Media Startup, and I remember the glee that one engineer had on his face as he walked around the room, showing off neat CSS3 tricks on his iPhone. It was unlike anything any of us had seen before. It supported a new web with rich internet applications, Web 2.0. The iPhone standardized applications that loaded from a web address were updated on their own and had smooth animations using the latest CSS specifications developed at the time. It wasn’t till years of asking for a way to load custom “native apps” that Apple launched an App store and gave people more access to the hardware and data on the device.
Apple could use technologies like WebXR to enable a Web 3.0 rich in VR and AR experiences with more privacy and openness. It would force Facebook to open up their devices to compete, and it would completely change the landscape of VR/AR from the walled garden it is in today back closer to the landscapes that visionaries like Jaron Lanier and other sci-fi writers saw decades ago. A rich, broad synthetic reality layered over our own, a diaspora of data and content creators challenging the monolithic walled gardens winning today. For many engineers, it would feel like we are back on track, trying to create tech for everyone.
And, here’s the thing … maybe Apple is doing just that. There’s some evidence to show that Apple is supporting WebXR in the next version of iOS, which might mean that their XR headsets might support it, too, in a big way.
The iPhone lets you bookmark a rich internet app to your home screen, just like an app; what if Apple’s VR headset gives the same priority to WebXR sites? Screw the Metaverse, with its highly managed real estate values, an Open Web version using WebXR technologies would be so-o-o cool. What if you could self-host your own XR experiences? Just like you self-host your own blog. What if Museums, Schools, and Businesses can leverage all of the web’s tech to host their own VR/XR experiences?
Maybe Apple will popularize WebXR like they popularized AJAX, CSS3, and HTML5.
I wouldn’t predict that Apple would release an XR headset without an AppStore, but maybe, just maybe, the Apple View (as it’s rumored to be called ) will make the web a first-party citizen of its experience.
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If you liked this article, you might want to read My thoughts on Apple releasing a VR headset in 2022.
