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xeonsorcerer
Participant
March 13, 2021

App Sharing & App Lab

I have 2 accounts on 2 Q2s.
I can share most of the apps from primary user to the secondary user.
However, I realized that secondary user can not see App Lab apps.
 
Is this intentional ? Is the secondary user restricted to store apps only ?
 
I also realized that secondary user can not connect from her phone (Oculus app) to the phone and can not cast to phone. This is very weird. Why ?
 
is there a way to allow secondary user pair her phone to the Q2 ?

      20 replies

      xeonsorcererAuthor
      Participant
      March 16, 2021

      nobody interested in this ?

        dewthedew902
        Participant
        March 17, 2021

        No phone for secondary user..at least yet. No casting either...yet. Remember this is still an “experiment” not a straight up feature. 

        also only apps that share are paid apps. If they are free...the secondary user can just download them  his/herself from the App Store. Can get app lab games directly from quest this way too. 

        satshanti
        Participant
        March 18, 2021

        I don't think this is entirely true. I tried to get a free app lab game in the secondary user's own Oculus store in a browser, because I encountered the same issue as the OP. Unfortunately, it didn't show up on the headset anywhere, not in the primary nor the secondary user's library, not under Shared nor Uninstalled. So it's currently not possible for my wife, with whom I'm sharing all my bought games, to play any of the app lab games, and therefore it's also not possible for us to play these together. The only way to currently do that is to reset her headset and make her the primary user, but in that case she'll have to buy all games herself, which defies the purpose of the family sharing feature. I honestly don't understand why sharing app lab games with a secondary account is switched off. There are quite a few games I'd love to be able to play together. Please Oculus, switch that feature on! 

          dewthedew902
          Participant
          March 18, 2021

          In order to get it through the store In the headset, you have to search for it in the store but search by the EXACT name...example. If game is called “boom time” and you search for “boom”...it won’t show up. You’d have to search for exact spelling...then there will be an “app lab” icon in the search results. Click that, then it will reveal the game to download. 

          look at the first section of this video. It shows how to get the ha d tracking version of “first steps” which is an app lab game. You can see what I mean about the app lab icon in the search results. 

          https://youtu.be/42ld2qycXzs

           

          xeonsorcererAuthor
          Participant
          March 17, 2021

          Not all app lab games are free. So if they are not considered to be shared , user has to pay twice if he wants to play on 2 accounts.

           

          Besides these games are not listed on store. So the secondary user can not even find them.

          satshanti
          Participant
          March 19, 2021

          I agree. The fact that none of the app lab apps (paid and free) are available to the secondary user makes it extremely likely that the feature of sharing app lab games is switched off by Oculus themselves, not by all of their developers. The only reason I can think of why they would have decided to do that, is possibly security concerns due to the experimental nature of both app lab and app sharing. But they seem to be "curating" app lab games as well anyway, considering that these apps all have to be approved and trickle slowly into the Oculus ecosystem. So why not make sure they're app-sharing compatible and make that feature available. I do hope they'll consider doing so in the next firmware update. 

          xeonsorcererAuthor
          Participant
          March 19, 2021

          the most weird part is that when we try to point this "problem" , people from community comment on the contrary  with little or zero information about the fact.

          why ?

            dewthedew902
            Participant
            March 19, 2021

            Because there is no “problem” with the system...it’s developers that have to get moving on coding in new features into their games. 

            satshanti
            Participant
            March 19, 2021

            The plot thickens... I just updated the apps on my wife's headset and to my pleasant surprise discovered that out of the 10+ app lab apps I have installed on it, the best of the bunch (IMHO) Puzzling Places, showed up in her account under the All category. That's the only app and the only place it appears in, not in Shared, not in Uninstalled, not in Installed. Like with regular apps, as soon as you run it once, it does show up under Installed as well, but still not under Shared. Weird huh!

              dewthedew902
              Participant
              March 19, 2021

              That is how it has worked for me from the start. Even my regular games like Arizona sunshine. That did not show up under shared or installed. It only showed up under “all”. Once it was played, then it showed up under installed.

               

              initially nothing showed up under shared or installed at all...was just blank for both. so my wife just does everything from the “all” sorting category. Even though once she does, it will show up under installed, but still nothing under shared. So to avoid confusion. She just sticks with the all page. my guess is that’s a glitch, but it’s still only an experimental feature. Will probably take the rest of the year or more before they role it out as a standard feature. 


              still no beat saber or fit XR which are her 2 favorite games though. And from what I read online..the climb 2 doesn’t share...even though it releases after the date of all new apps needing to have the share feature. It’s one of the oculus store requirements now. Can’t make it into the regular store unless you make it shareable. So the climb 2 came out after that cut off date but that’s not shareable either...my guess is that it released like right at the cutoff date so probably got through by some technicality. So will have to wait for a future update. 

               

               

                satshanti
                Participant
                March 19, 2021

                I was just thinking that there are 2 possible explanations for my previous post: 1) Oculus initially had all apps switched off and decided in the last few days to experimentally switch on sharing for one app only, the most highly rated one. 2} It was never Oculus' decision in the first place, but indeed up to the developers themselves and the Puzzling Places developer was the only one who decided to make this feature available. Hmmm... I hope it's the latter, because then developers could just implement the feature themselves in an update. It could very well be the former though. I had contacted their support desk on this issue as well a couple of days ago and they wrote that they would look into the matter. To be continued...

                  xeonsorcererAuthor
                  Participant
                  March 19, 2021

                  I'm still saying the same thing: if the secondary user does not install AN "app lab" game, he/she can not see it anywhere. Not under shared, not under all.

                   

                  satshanti 

                  are you sure that you did not install "Puzzling Places" on secondary user account?  since it is a free game, you might have already installed it on secondary acct.
                   
                    satshanti
                    Participant
                    March 19, 2021

                    Yes, I was out of the house for a while and I suddenly remembered that this was the only one I had actually "bought" for free directly through her account. As it didn't show up under Not installed or shared, I had assumed it didn't work, but it looks like it does. So it IS possible to install app lab games on the secondary account as long as you buy or get it through one's own Oculus account, which means for the paid apps you need to pay twice. I'm still not convinced this is the developer's choice though. I still think it could very well be Oculus who decided not to make app lab apps available for multi-user situations.

                    dewthedew902
                    Participant
                    March 19, 2021

                    I couldn’t know for sure. But from all the research I did, it seems it’s on the developers from my view. 

                    but if I were to humor the fact that oculus was blocking App lab. .. I could see that because it’s an unofficial store, not oculus official. So sharing could be a bonus of being an oculus official Store app. that doesn’t seem far-fetched, just haven’t found any evidence pointing that way from researching. 

                    also we gotta remember that the app sharing feature, in the first place, is only an experimental feature. Meaning it’s a beta test feature. There is no “official” support for it yet. So a lot of things could change and a lot of new features can come to it. So if they are intentionally blocking Apple, maybe it’s only while the feature is experimental and once it is official, they won’t. Like I said I don’t think they are blocking in the first place but this is also a possibility. 

                    bottom line is I think we have to give it a few months and see what happens. 

                    Anonymous
                    September 14, 2022

                    It seems that this is still an issue. I wanted to share Oceancraft, which is in the app lab. I paid for it, and it works on my account, but doesn't show up for the other user. What's interesting is that if I search for the app by name and show it in app lab on their account, it says the app is already shared...but when I click to view it, the app isn't there. lol Seems like an oversight by someone at Meta. This type of oversight is unacceptable IMO. 

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