According to one Post on Instagram from Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Meta isn’t shutting down VR support for Horizon Worlds after all, which should be a huge relief to, say, five people.
“We’ve decided, just today actually, that we’re going to continue working on Horizon Worlds in VR,” Bosworth said as part of an Instagram Stories Q&A after a fan of the app reached out to say they were “hurt” about the decision.
A Meta spokesperson confirmed Bosworth’s comments to TechCrunch.
Meta said earlier this year that it would stop supporting the social metaverse app on its Quest VR headset, which was a big concession for an app that Meta once envisioned as central to socializing in VR. As it turned out, very few people actually wanted to hang out in VR. On Tuesday, Meta confirmed this community forums that Horizon Worlds would only be ported to web and mobile on June 15, but that announcement was quickly reversed.
Even if Horizon Worlds will now remain accessible through Quest, the fact that Meta planned to shut it down is proof enough that the metaverse – or at least as it was imagined in VR – turned out to be a black hole where Reality Labs’ funding went to die. This section in Meta lost 73 billion dollars from 2021, the year Meta was rebranded by Facebook. As we pointed out earlier, you would have to spend $1 million a day for 200 years to spend that much money. (Reality Labs also takes into account spending on augmented reality products like smart glasses, as well as some artificial intelligence research.)
According to IDC, a technology market intelligence firm, sales of Meta Quest’s headsets fell 16% on an annual basis from 2024 to 2025, making it seem unlikely that this hardware will ever actually compete with the smartphone. It’s not just the Meta that has struggled to make VR exciting – Apple was forced to cut production of its $3,500 Vision Pro headset due to low demand.
Meta responded to this decline by making significant cuts to its Reality Labs division in January, affecting more than 1,500 employees and closing several game studios. Rumor has it that Meta is considering another, more significant round of layoffs, which could affect 20% of the company.
Although Meta will continue to support Horizon Worlds for Quest headsets, the company still plans to prioritize the mobile experience. Bosworth he said on a podcast with reporter Alex Heath that Horizon had turned its attention to mobile as it better suited the product market there.
“There’s a much larger audience on mobile and it’s had a really positive recovery on mobile,” Bosworth said of the app. “[The team] it has to build everything twice — they build it once for mobile and build it again for VR. There’s a really easy way to get them up to speed, like, let them build for mobile.”
Mobile information company Appfigures told TechCrunch that the Horizon Worlds mobile app has received a total of 45 million downloads worldwide on iOS and Google Play, with 1.5 million downloads so far in 2026. That’s a 53% year-over-year increase compared to last year, when the Horizon Worlds app had approximately 983,000 downloads at this point.
However, Appfigures estimates that consumers have spent just $1.1 million in total consumer spending on the app, which is pocket change compared to the size of Meta’s investments in the metaverse.
Bosworth is right that there’s a bigger opportunity for Horizon Worlds on mobile than on Quest headsets — but Meta will need to see a lot more consumer spending to prove the app is worth the investment.
