Meta Shipped Quest v77 Update Knowing It Had Major Bugs, Despite QA Pledge

Meta shipped the Quest v77 update knowing it had major bugs, the company’s CTO has acknowledged, despite his pledge to improve quality control.

Last month, Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth said the company was “taking seriously” developer complaints of OS performance regressions, undocumented misguided changes, and bugs. He said Meta was “spending time on” addressing it, and “doing the work” to solve it.

“We appreciate the feedback as always, from developers, [and we] take it seriously. It’s our responsibility, these are our mistakes, and we’re gonna fix them”, Bosworth said at the time.

Meta CTO Responds To Quest Performance Regression Issues

Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth has responded to developer concerns over Quest’s Horizon OS performance regression and the puzzling Battery Saver change.

But around three weeks ago Meta started rolling out v77, and developers have encountered even more bugs in this new release. To be clear, we’re not referring to bugs in the new Navigator system interface. These bugs are at the core of the OS experience.

In a thread on X, Virtual Desktop’s developer Guy Godin publicly decried the decision to roll out v77. He described how issues he had reported in the Public Test Channel (PTC) build like audio crackling, audio cutting out when switching to passthrough, VP8 video decoding no longer working, and MediaCodec were still present in the “stable” build.

“Good job ignoring all the reports during PTC and pushing your update anyway”, Godin complained. Multiple other developers tell UploadVR they’re experiencing similar issues.

In an ask-me-anything (AMA) session on his Instagram page, Bosworth was asked why people on “the bird app”, referring to Twitter (now X), were “mad at” him.

Bosworth responded that it was “for good reason, I’m sad to say”.

“Our quality control hasn’t been where we need it to be”, he acknowledged, as he alluded to unspecified reasons for having to push an update with bugs to millions of headsets:

We actually saw these issues in PTC. For reasons I can’t get into, we had to roll anyways.

People say “how could you do it!?” Well, these bugs don’t affect a huge number of people. They do affect devs, who I care about a lot, and they do affect a specific set of people, who I care about a lot.

We’re working on the fixes. Some of them require firmware updates from Qualcomm, and so there’s a process that we’re going through there.

We’re working with urgency on this. We’re not happy about it. There’s a bunch of reasons we had to proceed anyways, and it’s a measured call with some benefits and some costs. But we shouldn’t even be in a position to make that call, because we should have much better quality control sooner.

It’s a process. We’re working on it. My commitment to that hasn’t faded at all.