Meta And Apple In ‘Very Deep, Philosophical Competition’ To Build The Metaverse

Mark Zuckerberg Meta CEO believes that Apple and his company meta are in a “very deep, philosophical competition” to build the metaverse, suggesting the two tech giants are ready to butt heads in selling hardware The Meta CEO told staff in start of this month that they were competing with Apple to determine “what direction the internet should go in,” according to a recording of his comments during an internal all-hands meeting obtained by The Verge. He said that Meta would position itself as the more open, cheaper alternative to Apple, which is expected to announce its first AR headset as soon as later this year.

“This is a competition of philosophies and ideas, where they believe that by doing everything themselves and tightly integrating that they build a better consumer experience,” Zuckerberg said of the brooding rivalry. “And we believe that there is a lot to be done in specialization across different companies, and [that] will allow a much larger ecosystem to exist.”for augmented and virtual reality.

Since rebranding Facebook’s company name to Meta, Zuckerberg has been pushing for the concept of interoperability for the metaverse, or what he sees as the next major chapter of computing after mobile phones. Meta recently helped stand up the Metaverse Open Standards Group with Microsoft, Epic Games, and others. The idea is to spur the creation of open protocols that will let people easily move through future immersive, 3D worlds with their virtual goods.

Apple is absent from the group, which Zuckerberg called out as not surprising in his comments to staff. He explained how Apple’s approach of building hardware and software it tightly controls had worked well with the iPhone, but that for the metaverse, “it’s not really clear upfront whether an open or closed ecosystem is going to be better.”

Apple and Meta have never really seen eye to eye. The former is currently costing the latter billions of dollars a year in lost ad revenue on iOS, thanks to its prompt that asks people if they want a third-party app to track them for showing ads. Zuckerberg’s remarks suggest that even as he tries to invent his way out of being under Apple’s thumb on mobile, the two tech giants are going to be battling for years to come.