XR Developer News - October 2025
We're still in peak tech news season and this neatly applied to the XR space as well. Google and Samsung finally showed off Galaxy XR, Snap held its big yearly conference, Meta was productive as usual and the rest of the industry didn't sit still either. Next month things will likely start to slow down towards the end of the year, but for now, buckle up!
Google & Samsung
A good two and a half years after first mentioning it, Samsung and Google finally launched the first Android XR device: Samsung Galaxy XR. I'm really curious how it will fare, because it's very expensive (roughly half a Vision Pro, which in turn is insanely expensive) and is clearly positioned as competition to Apple, but doesn't really seem to present a clear direct response to the Meta Quest 3/3S, apart from repeatedly saying "AI, AI, AI, AI, AI".
Still, it's very good to see more competition to Meta and Apple enter the XR market, and I hope it does well enough to stick around for future hardware iterations, considering Google's track record in the VR space.
Compliments to Google are due for its broad support of various developer avenues for building for Android XR. Whether it's native Android, Unity, other OpenXR-based approaches or WebXR, Google supports all of them, which is a breath of fresh air compared to Apple's native-Xcode-heavy approach.
Celebrating the launch, Google has been sharing a lot of developer resources on its Android blog in what it's calling Android XR Spotlight Week, diving into Jetpack, getting started and performance optimization with Unity and publishing to the Play Store. And to top it off, it hosted a panel discussion with several of the people in the Android XR developer support teams.
There wasn't actually a whole lot of new information as both Android XR and the device (as Project Moohan) have been public a while now, but it's good to actually see the device enter the market now. Hopefully it'll turn into a serious player in the XR market with a respectable marketshare, to keep the competition on its toes.
Snap
At Snap, it was time for Lens Fest this month, its yearly developer conference. Spectacles '24 have been out for a year now and Snap has been pushing out a consistent stream of significant developer updates throughout the year. And Lens Fest was no different.
The keynote featured all of the major announcements, including a Q&A section with Snap's CEO and CTO.
Snap OS on Spectacles got a big update to v2.0 (release notes, reddit, actual version number is 5.64 but who's counting anyway) and a deep dive session at Lens Fest. Lens Studio was updated to v5.15.
The recordings of various sessions have gradually been appearing on Snap's YouTube channels, so check out the relevant Lens Studio playlist, Spectacles videos and Alessio Grancini video for anything that might interest you specifically.
Looking at the announcements, the Supabase integration is nice, but Commerce Kit sounds even more interesting by starting to offer monetisation options. Splitting UI elements out of SIK into a separate UI Kit makes sense and the new look feels a bit more clean and less cartoony than the previous, so definitely an improvement. Mobile Kit is a nice echo of Meta's Wearables Device Access Toolkit, really building that idea of a link between your smartphone and glasses. Oh, and I'm really curious to give WebXR in the new browser a spin, if I can find some time for it. Same goes for the MCP integration in Lens Studio, really curious to try that with Cursor. All together a very solid showing by Snap at Lens Fest.
Just before I published this edition, Kent Bye released a series of Voices of VR podcast interviews from Lens Fest which seem quite interesting. I haven't had a chance to check them out yet, but be sure to check out #1667 to #1677.
Meta
With Meta Connect behind us, Meta is back to its regular cadence of updates:
- The biggest news was that, with quite a pause since v79 in July, it pushed out Horizon OS v81 with a bunch of updates to the home environment.
David Heaney
- The Immersive Web SDK which Meta announced at Connect was highlighted in a blog post and the browser on Horizon OS got some updates.
- While Unity is the most prominent way of developing for Horizon OS, Unreal Engine luckily also gets its fair share of attention from Meta, for instance with new samples.
- Getting back to Meta Connect, in addition to the videos released right away, there was an on-site program, of which the recordings are now also available on Meta's Developer YouTube channel. Have a browse to see if anything covers your areas of interest.
- Kent Bye published an interesting series of interviews from Meta Connect as part of his Voices of VR podcast. Check out #1652 to #1666 and make sure to support him through his Patreon, so he can continue doing this excellent work.
- iFixit took a look at the internals of the new Meta Ray-Ban Display in its teardown.
Other XR hardware, software and news
- Just in time to be ahead of Google and Samsung's Galaxy XR launch, Apple pushed out an update to the Vision Pro, bringing it from M2 to M5 (The Verge, UploadVR). The chip in Galaxy XR isn't nearly as powerful, being in similar territory to the compute in a Quest 3, so it's interesting to see what kind of graphical fidelity the M5 will make possible in a stand-alone headset at the highest end of the market.
- Unity rolled out its support for visionOS 26.
- If you're building with Unity, have a look to see whether you should be worried about a vulnerability in many Unity versions from the last years.
- At Unreal Fest Stockholm, Epic previewed Unreal Engine 5.7.
- This one actually belonged in last month's blog, but I missed that Godot 4.5 was released in September.
- And finally, in a bit of shameless self-promotion (hope that you don't mind if you read all the way down here to the end), I've been continuing the work I've been doing on Snap Spectacles. If you're interested in what's possible with Spectacles in the area of showing city data in AR, check out the video!
Pieter Siekerman
Upcoming XR events
- October 30, 2025 - The next edition of XR Creators Connect NL, the XR meetup in The Netherlands which I co-organize.
- Over the last 12-24 months we noticed that permanent, in-house XR teams are appearing in many large organisations in The Netherlands. We're being joined by representatives of those teams at KLM, the Netherlands Police, NS and ASML, to share what they're working on and the lessons they've learned building XR in such settings.
- October 30 - November 26, 2025 - XR Creator Con Online (unrelated to XRCC NL, just an unfortunate shared name), a large online hackathon by the awesome team that also organises the yearly in-person XRCC hackathon in Germany.
- November 16-18, 2025 - SensAI Hack - which confusingly (considering the name) is more an XR hackathon than an AI hackathon - in Barcelona, Spain in advance of Unity's Unite Barcelona.
- November 19-20, 2025 - Unity's Unite 2025 in Barcelona, Spain.
- December 8-10, 2025 - United XR Europe in Brussels, Belgium. A new event resulting from a merger between AWE EU and Stereopsia.
- January 22-26, 2026 - Reality Hack at MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
- February 2-4, 2026 - AWE Asia in Singapore.
- April 8-10, 2026 - Laval Virtual in Laval, France.
- June 15-18, 2026 - AWE USA in Long Beach, California.
A bit about this newsletter
Each month I try to round up all the interesting developments in the XR developer landscape. New hardware and software releases, events, tooling, etc. Feel free to reach out to me on LinkedIn, for instance if I missed anything which definitely should be in this monthly round up next time. Want to know more? Check out the about page.
