apps from unknow sources not showing after updating v54

I'm not even surprised at this point. Meta has been dropping the ball ever since they fired half of their VR/AR team. First we had to deal with the low memory crashing that gave us the biggest headache thinking it's us and not them, then people were saying v54 breaks controllers and lots of other things, and now we may not even be able to test our app. Hilarious.

Hiya there txvrmanager! We hate to hear that you are having trouble with opening unknown content. We are more than happy to lend you a hand with this. Here are some tips you can try to enable the feature:

To allow content from unknown sources:

1. Open the Oculus app on your PC computer.
2. Select Settings in the left menu.
3. Select the General tab.
4. Next to Unknown Sources, adjust the toggle and then confirm to allow content from unknown sources.

We hope this helps. If you continue having the same issue. Please reach back out. We'd be more than happy to continue assisting you. 

I just got auto updated to v54 (thought I'd disabled auto updates 🙁 ).  This had me stumped and I found your post but also found the solution after a bit of clicking around.  If you click the search bar in the App Library window, you can select 'Unknown Sources' again from the drop down.

Hope this helps!

Same here, yesterday it worked, but today it does not. It did a software update in between, it looks like they removed the whole menu about different types of software.

I tried restarting, re enabling dev mode, connecting with ADB, but nada. Someone said I should try disconnecting the battery to reset the device, but I'm not going to risk my device like that.

Honestly I feel like not letting end users acses the default android settings app is a bad idea On top of the removal of g apps and Google play

Until the v54, I was able to use Rookie to side load my own Unity apps to the Meta Quest and the app would show up in Apps menu (only in the Unknown Sources menu not even in the All menu). I was able to run such side loaded apps with no issue. However, after the v54 update, when I side load my Unity app with Rookie, the status sent back to Rookie is that the side load finished without issues but the app does not get displayed on the headset in any menu (including the Unknown Sources menu where it was found before).

I still see side loaded apps that I side loaded before the update. Some of them work. Some do not.

In addition some non-side loaded apps refuse to run. I downloaded the Skybox Trail from the Meta Store. One of the stock apps (Meta Gallery or Meta Videos or something) also refused to run.

I have ensured that Developer mode is turned on in the headset and on the phone. The headset does connect to my PC allowing me to add media files to the headset (which do show up on the headset) and side load (but those side loaded apps don't show up on the headset).

I have tried restarting the headset but that does not help. I have not tried to factory reset the headset yet.

Update: I did try to look for the side loaded files on the headset but, at least when using the Meta Files app, I was not able to locate them. However, I also was not able to locate the side loaded apps which still remain and work, so I am assuming that the side loaded content gets placed somewhere where the Meta Files app doesn't see them.

@MetaQuestSupport, Update: I tried using SideQuest instead of Rookie and I got similar request. I was able to install SideQuest app. I was able to Sideload one of the web offered apps (Commodore64 app) and it seemed to have worked. However, when I sideloaded the web offered Tron Custom Home it appeared in Unknown Sources (and not in Custom Homes) and it did not run from Unknown Sources. In addition when I used the PC version which has the ability to side load custom APKs, the side loading reported successful but the app, similar to using Rookie, did not show up in the apps list (under any category). This seems to indicated that the side loader (SideQuest or Rookie) and not the issue and that the issue is, likely, related to the update on the headset itself.

@MetaQuestSupport, Update: Using SideQuest, I saw that in the Android/Data folder there was data files for apps that I had removed. Also SideQuest was unable to remove these files. When the delete button was used, it said success but the file persisted. I changed the package name for my Unity project and was able to side load it and have it show up in the Unknown Source apps section. However, the app would not start. It asked me to confirm the boundary and then showed the "three loading dots" endlessly.

This seems to suggest that the reason why the side loaded app did not show up is because it may have had some residual files on the headset which the side loader was not able to overwrite. My changing the name, there was no conflict and the app was able to side load...but still not able to run.