What is the current status for KIOSK like features on the Quest?

Hello,

I am having a hard time finding clearer information about the KIOSK capabilities on the Quests headsets.

I wish this post to become a place to collect the state-of-the-art about this issue, as well as any tricks or hacks people have done to alleviate the problem.

The situation

My understand is that all KIOSK like features are unilaterally forbidden, even for apps in developer mode and that will not be published to the store (please prove me wrong).

Why this is important

XR (more than other media) is used a lot for presentation, educational or entertainment activities where the user is not the owner of the device, never used the device before, and is offered to try an individual experience at an event by some staff on site.

These can be VR-movies, game demos, festivals, dealership, exhibitions, museums and so on.

In these situations the Meta Horizon OS has to be hidden as much as possible and the staff on site needs to be able to offer the user a single experience without extra disruption and distraction.

So this does not apply to publishable apps, where KIOSK features would of course be absolutely against the consumer experience, expectations and needs, but rather for digital experiences manually offered on site to the public.

What features I am talking about

1. App locking

The user should not be easily able to exit the app. This is the most important one, as the other issues can be more easily circumvented by code or manual setups. But currently it is very easy to do so, and this is extremely painful on hand tracking mode, where the Meta button is very prominent in the animation (you look at your hand and it appears) and pressing it by curiosity or accidentally is extremely common, breaking the experience, having user confused and calling for the staff to intervene.

Furthermore, mischievous user can just go in the menu of the headset and mess up settings and what not, making the setup more fragile to maintain by the staff during the event. 

2. App self launch

When managing many headsets on site it is cumbersome for the staff to have to wear them and go through the menu to make sure they have the desired app launched.

So any "automatically start app X after startup" feature becomes very valuable.

3. Fleet control

When managing many devices on important events, is common practice to develop a control dashboard which can do many activities (check status, battery, remotely reboot, remotely restart the experience, remotely trigger an app update, and more). It's more advanced but is among the things that people are looking for when talking about KIOSK features.

What are the solutions?

I have heard of Meta Horizon managed services (link) and I heard bad things about it (link) and that it is being phased out (link). So It doesn't seem a solution anymore and it was always overkill if one wanted to simply disable the Meta menu access for events use case. Is there an alternative to it?

I have heard about the wrist menu button (link, also link) which at least makes the button less prominent. But it's deprecated (I guess for accessibility concerns?). Any way to reactivate it for who wants it?

Arbor XR (link) seems to offer premium KIOSK features. Has anyone tired it? From their language it seems that they need your headset to be first registered with the Horizon managed services, which is now being phased out. Does it means that Arbor XR is no longer capable of doing KIOSK for Quest in the future? Same story for ManagerXR (link) it seems.

I have seen some community hacks, most seems no longer valid (OculusKiosk, Random Guy). I would imagine, as Quest is build on Andorid, that one could develop some background service or APK which auto-boot stuff, and maybe even locks the app (something like android-keep-alive but that actually work with the Quest). This can be hard because to do it properly it would need to talk with the Horizon OS and Meta do not exposes that. So it seems in the realm of reverse-engineering. Anybody got any luck?

One solution that must be mentioned, is to simply use non-Meta headsets. Hi Pico.

Any hint, extra info or suggestion is deeply appreciated 🙏

Thank you,

Luca