"Starting" in Horizon OS v85, the new 'Navigator' UI will become the default, and Horizon Feed will be "gradually" removed from the OS.

In a Meta Community Forums post, a 'Community Manager' with the handle h.taylor announced the upcoming changes, set to arrive in the next version of the Horizon OS of Quest headsets:

As announced during Connect, we’ve been testing Navigator and will ramp up the rollout later this year, starting in v85. As Navigator rolls out, we’ll also begin gradually sunsetting the Horizon Feed in VR.

What’s changing

• Navigator will become the default landing experience when users turn on their headset.

• Navigator brings experiences, friends and settings together in one place.

• As part of this shift, we’ll be sunsetting the Horizon Feed in VR.

Horizon OS v83 started rolling out in November, and there's no set date for the arrival of v85.

Navigator Becoming Default

Since the release of Oculus Go almost eight years ago, Meta's standalone VR operating system has seen numerous visual changes, but the general interface architecture remained essentially the same.

You had a floating horizontal menu bar slightly below you, called the Universal Menu, showing the time and your device battery levels and containing shortcuts to key system interfaces, as well as a combination of your most recent and eventually a few of your favorite apps. All 2D interfaces, including system features like the app Library, Quick Settings, and Notifications, opened as 2D windows, treated like any other.

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Then, in May last year, Meta started a very slow rollout of a full Horizon OS UI overhaul, called 'Navigator', which moves the main system interfaces like Library, Quick Settings, Notifications and Camera into a new large overlay that appears over both immersive and 2D apps.

With Navigator, system interfaces no longer shift around when opening other windows, and it's easier to launch new apps. Navigator's library also allows you to pin up to 10 items, somewhat akin to the Start Menu on Windows.

At launch, Navigator also had a murky gray background with an oval shape. It was seemingly intended to improve contrast. But as well as obscuring your view of what was behind it, be it passthrough or a virtual world, it just didn't look good. So Meta got rid of that and made bringing up Navigator dim the background instead.

With Horizon OS v83 PTC in October, Meta started rolling out an evolved version of Navigator, which it teased at Connect 2025.

The evolved Navigator has a new Worlds tab for Horizon Worlds destinations, and you no longer see worlds in your app Library at all. Speaking of the Library, it now features interleaving offset rows, similar to Apple's visionOS.

The new Navigator also has a new overlay-level People tab with shortcuts to your friends, as well as a You tab that shows your avatar and lets you change your active status.

Finally, the new Navigator lets you easily hide or show all your 2D windows by double pressing the Meta button on the right Touch controller, or for hand tracking, opening your right palm and double tapping your thumb to your index finger.

Horizon Feed Being Removed

Horizon Feed is the default 2D app that launches when you cold boot your Quest headset.

Originally simply called 'Explore', the feed shows you suggested Horizon Worlds destinations, store apps, VR videos, Instagram reels, and online followers, as well as suggested friends to "catch up" with and apps to "jump back in" to.

The Community Forums post tells developers that the version of Horizon Feed inside the headset "is not a high-intent surface, and users often see it without a specific intent to browse or purchase apps".

"Because of that, it historically has not driven strong entitlement conversion, and we don’t expect significant revenue impact for the vast majority of developers", the post reads.

That essentially seems to be Meta admitting that Horizon Feed is something that most Quest owners just close immediately on booting the headset, like an unwanted popup, and wasn't successful at getting people to buy the apps that it suggested.

Meta CTO Explains Layoffs & Strategy Shift: “VR Is Growing Less Quickly Than We Hoped”

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The coming removal of Horizon Feed from Horizon OS comes as Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth suggested that the company's repeated push to Quest owners to use Horizon Worlds came at "an expense of user experience", vowing to "let VR be what it is, what it does" and "focus a lot more on the third-party content library, the ecosystem that's developed there".

In a series of interviews at Davos, Meta's CTO explained why the company is reducing its investment in VR.

If you somehow missed it: last week Meta shut down three of its acquired VR game studios, conducted significant layoffs at a fourth, canceled the Batman: Arkham Shadow sequel, and announced the shutdown of Horizon Workrooms and its Quest headsets for business offering. These actions came a month after the company officially confirmed "shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables".

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At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has finally made public statements about the VR layoffs and shutdowns, via a series of interviews.

One of the interviews was with veteran tech reporter Alex Heath. While Heath hasn't yet shared the interview (this is set to happen in the coming days), he has published an article with key quotes wherein Bosworth declares that "VR is growing less quickly than we hoped".

“We’re still continuing to invest heavily in this space, but obviously, VR is growing less quickly than we hoped,” Bosworth apparently told Heath. “And so you want to make sure that your investment is right-sized.”

According to Heath, Bosworth claimed that Meta has seen “really, really positive pickup” in Horizon Worlds on smartphones, and plans to double down on this with continued investment in Horizon on mobile.

“You've got a team that actually has product market fit in a huge market on mobile phones, and they're having to build everything twice. They're building it once for mobile phones, and building again for VR. There's a pretty easy way to increase their velocity: just let them build for mobile. So Horizon is very focused now on mobile — not exclusively, but almost exclusively,” Bosworth is quoted as saying.

Another interview, available in full on YouTube, was conducted by Axios' chief technology correspondent Ina Fried.

In it, Bosworth gave a very similar explanation for Meta's shift in strategy.

"It's like any investment, you're gonna look at how you do over the course of years and you're gonna reinvest in some areas and trim your losses in others.

For us, we're seeing tremendous growth of our metaverse on mobile. You know, Horizon is this thing that started on VR headsets. But obviously there's much more users today on mobile phones. We've been pivoting over the last year to focus on the mobile market and it's going really well, and so you kinda wanna double down on that."

Bosworth also seemed to suggest that Meta's significant investment in the VR side of Horizon Worlds, and repeated pushes to convince Quest headset wearers to use it, came at "an expense of user experience".

"We're gonna let VR be what it is, what it does", Bosworth said. "We're gonna have focus a lot more on the third-party content library, the ecosystem that's developed there."

That seems to suggest that Meta will pull back on pushing Horizon Worlds for VR users and on making its own content, leaving the content ecosystem to third-party developers and letting headset owners choose the content they want.

Palmer Luckey thinks Meta closing its VR game studios is "a good thing for the long-term health of the industry", and that the narrative of it "abandoning" VR is "obviously false".

If you somehow missed it: last week Meta shut down three of its acquired studios – Twisted Pixel Games (Deadpool VR), Sanzaru Games (Asgard's Wrath), and Armature Studio (Resident Evil 4 VR) – and conducted significant layoffs at a fourth: Camouflaj (Batman: Arkham Shadow).

The closures are part of Meta's wider strategy of, in its own words, "shifting some of our investment from Metaverse toward AI glasses and Wearables", and the layoffs have affected around 10% of Meta's Reality Labs division, around 1500 people.

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This strategy shift has led some in the industry to speculate that Meta is abandoning VR entirely. But Oculus founder Palmer Luckey doesn't agree.

In a post on X, Luckey argued that last week's events were "not a disaster", pointing out that Meta still employs more people working on VR than any other company "by about an order of magnitude".

Further, Luckey explains that "crowding out the rest of the entire ecosystem" by forcing third-party developers to compete with blockbusters like Batman and Deadpool games that cost more to make than they would ever return "doesn't make sense", suggesting that the end of this strategy will be "a good thing for the long-term health of the industry".

He further notes that while some of these titles are received well, others fail, revealing that Rock Band VR, a 2017 Oculus Rift exclusive, sold just 700 copies.

Here's Palmer Luckey's full statement:

"I have an opinion on the Meta layoffs that is contrary with most of the VR industry and much of the media, but strongly held.

This is not a disaster. They still employ the largest team working on VR by about an order of magnitude. Nobody else is even close. The "Meta is abandoning VR" narrative is obviously false, 10% layoffs is basically six months of normal churn concentrated into 60 days, strictly numbers wise.

The majority of the 1,500 jobs cut in Reality Labs (out of 15,000) were roles working on first-party content, internally developed games that competed directly with third party developers. I think this is a good decision, and I thought the same back when I was still at Oculus.

Change always sucks because people lose their jobs in the process, but in a world of limited resources, Meta heavily subsidizing their own (with money, marketing, placement, etc) at the expense of core technical progress and platform stability doesn't make sense. Crowding out the rest of the entire ecosystem, even less so. Every developer big and small, even the hyper-efficient ones, have had an extremely hard time competing with games developed by Meta-owned teams with budgets and teams that spend vastly in excess of earning potential. People will point out that these teams did an awesome job and got awesome reviews from critics and customers alike - yes, and fucked up though it is, that makes the problem even worse!

Some people will say "they should have just funded those developers as external studios rather than acquiring them, then!". Yes, I agree, but hindsight is 20/20. Do you think Oculus expected to only sell 700 copies of Rock Band VR after spending eight figures to make sure it was ready and awesome for Rift CV1 launch, to the point of bundling the guitar adapter with every single headset? Of course not, but sometimes you learn what the world actually wants from you the hard way.

TL;DR, I feel really bad for the people impacted, but this is a good thing thing for the long-term health of the industry, especially the ongoing incentives.

(Nobody at Meta knows I am making this post)"

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After being fired from Oculus by Facebook in 2017, Luckey founded Anduril, a defense firm that makes and sells drones, loitering munitions, interceptors, cruise missiles, sentry towers, and even unmanned submarines, as well as a software system that integrates them and other assets into a unified view of the battlespace. It was most recently valued at over $30 billion.

In 2024, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth publicly apologized to Luckey, an apology which he also publicly accepted. And last year, Anduril and Meta announced a partnership to build XR products for US and allied militaries, starting with the EagleEye AR/VR helmet.

"The people acting like I am some stooge who will obviously agree with everything Meta does need to read a history book or something, jfc

Oculus had a strong internal mandate to NOT be Nintendo and instead build things that build the ecosystem. Returning to that is good."

In response to the idea that he was "stooge who will obviously agree with everything Meta does", Luckey suggests those under that belief read a history book.