Headsets are what the reviews film. But the real war — the one that will shape the next 20 years — isn't fought over devices. It's fought over operating systems.

Think about phones: hardware makers came and went (remember Nokia? HTC? LG?), but iOS and Android stayed and captured the value of the whole industry. We are watching the same film again in XR — only this time we know the script in advance. 🏰

The three towers

visionOS (Apple) — the most polished platform, born with Vision Pro in 2024. Over a million compatible apps from the iOS ecosystem, but native spatial apps number in the hundreds. The strategy is classic Apple: a walled garden, seamless integration with Mac and iPhone, a premium experience. The weakness is classic too: everything goes through the App Store and Cupertino's rules — and the hardware, as we saw in Episode 1, is on pause. Android XR (Google) — the newcomer with the biggest swing. Google came back to XR with a whole operating system, debuting on Samsung Galaxy XR, with Gemini AI as its central nervous system and the Play Store catalogue behind it. The key strategic weapon: Android XR is open to multiple manufacturers — Samsung today, XREAL Aura and others tomorrow. Google is playing the same card that won the phone war for Android: volume over polish. Horizon OS (Meta) — the veteran with the largest VR library. An Android (AOSP) fork that Meta has also opened to outside manufacturers. The irony from Episode 3: just as Meta shifted its attention to glasses, its operating system remained the most mature and most widely used in the headset segment — with the most affordable hardware and the most content people actually use.

Why this matters more than any headset comparison

Three reasons the OS war beats the spec sheets:

Apps follow the platform, not the device. Once you buy content in one ecosystem, it doesn't move. That's the lock-in mechanism — and the giants know it very well.
Developers pick the winner. A platform without developers dies (ask Windows Phone). That's why each of the three towers pours billions into tools, SDKs and revenue share.
Standards are a battlefield. OpenXR and WebXR exist precisely as an antidote to lock-in — a neutral layer that works everywhere. It's no accident that support for them varies depending on whose interests they serve at the moment.

The lesson for business: don't marry a tower

If the phone OS war taught us anything, it's that betting on one platform early is gambling with someone else's money — yours.

That's why our approach at VR Express is platform-neutral by design:

WebXR first, where it makes sense. An experience that lives in the browser runs on Quest, Vision Pro, Galaxy XR and on a job candidate's laptop — without a single app store. For marketing activations and employer branding that's not a compromise, it's a superpower.
Native where the power demands it. High-detail simulations and training we build natively — but with an architecture that allows porting between platforms without rewriting everything.
Content is the asset, the platform is a channel. The 3D models, scenarios and logic of an XR training programme are worth many times more than the port to a specific OS. Keep the asset portable.

The towers will fight for another decade. Your project doesn't have to die in somebody else's siege. ⚔️

Next in Meta Wars: Valve Steam Frame — the wildcard none of the three saw coming.

Part of the Meta Wars series — the chronicle of the war for the next computing platform.