In this article, we will be discussing Oculus vs Pico Store, the differences between the Oculus Store and the Pico Store for the B2B market.
Now before you invest in a virtual reality headset, you must be asking yourself which of the two has better services to offer? One of the variables is the VR headsets stores where you can publish your apps to a broader public.
Account Set-Up
For you to be able to download apps on both stores, you need an account for both platforms
For a user to get a Pico headset up and running, they simply have to power it on and create a Pico ID. Users can then publish apps through the Store with their Pico ID. With Oculus, it’s compulsory for Business users to have a Workplace Account, an Oculus Business Account and, in the future, a personal Facebook account.
If you have an Oculus for Business, Oculus Quest or Quest 2 device that runs enterprise software, then your Oculus for Business admin will need a Workplace account subject to the Workplace Online Terms
You will only need accounts for your admins, but not for each headset. The Oculus for Business admin may be a different person from your Workplace admin.
In addition, Facebook made it clear that “everyone using an Oculus device for the first time will need to log in with a Facebook account”. Existing users will have an option to log in with their Facebook account and merge their Oculus account with it permanently by 2023.
This is really not an ideal situation for business users. Since devices are exchanged around colleagues on a day to day basis, You cannot keep track of who is performing what task on whose Facebook account. It also leads to inaccurate data collection as different employees use the same account.
Multiple Device Set-Up
At the time of writing this article, one of the big differences between the two stores is that on Oculus, your Facebook account is required to be linked to the Oculus store, this means you can only set up a single device.
On the Contrary, Pico does not have this necessity of linking your social account to your Pico Account. Therefore, Pico lets you set up multiple devices with only one Pico Account.
Multi-User Account
Recently, Oculus emailed developers notifying them about an upcoming update. It was that one of the most requested features is going to roll out to the platform. The Multi-User accounts!
This feature will enable multiple accounts to be logged into a single headset. Initially, the feature will be launched on Quest 2 as experimental and roll out to all Quest users later on.
In Multi-User, a primary account can set up to three secondary accounts and enable App Sharing on a single device. Alongside the Multi-User account feature, App Sharing will also be rolled out
Furthermore, Oculus stated that to ensure the features are used as intended, they’ve established additional protections.
Oculus vs Pico Store: Publishing Process
Pico Publishing:
Publishing is one of the most time-consuming processes after the development phase of the Application Package. All the necessary requirements have to be met for an app to be listed on the stores.
In order to list an app to the Pico Store, it’s pretty much straight forward. Developers need to upload their app packages and pass-through Pico’s review and testing. The procedure also requires stating the specific time for publishing.
Oculus Publishing:
On the contrary, tyhe publishing the steps and requirements for Oculus are not so straightforward compared to Pico.
Oculus has a pretty extensive list of store requirements ranging from simple things as app names up to the VRC’s (Virtual Reality Check) guidelines. This leads to most Developers preferring Pico’s publishing procedure since it’s not as time-consuming and strict as Oculus is.
Conclusion on Oculus vs Pico Store
Therefore, when it comes down to VR Store usage, both Oculus and Pico have valuable content on their stores. We did find some apps in the Pico Store to be a bit buggy whereas the apps in the Oculus Store seem to have been tested more rigidly. Also, the amount of content in the Oculus Store is currently still bigger. So the easier usage of the Pico Store has not manifested in more content available and has the downside that some content is a bit buggy.
But in terms of User account flexibility, Pico definitely has an advantage over Oculus. Even though Oculus will soon allow multi-user accounts, Pico will continue to be more user-friendly in regard to accounts.
To learn more about the differences between Oculus and Pico, you can simply read this article. It discusses all the technical differences between the two platforms on both developer and business user perspective.
Did you find this article useful? Great! If you are looking for an easy way to manage your VR content, APK’s and Headsets, Smart VR Lab supports all Pico and Oculus devices. See here how it works.
If you have questions about the article, or anything related to VR, you can always send us a mail info@smartvrlab.nl