Unfortunately just the kind of experience you can expect when buying non-open systems. Company loses interest in hardware - it can stop everyone developing for it. If they would at least open it up for sideloading so the hardware isn't doomed to become electronic trash.
You can sideload. I've sideloaded some things on Quest, and as far as I can tell from googling it's the same on Go (I don't own one though).
However, in practice it's not going to get any new software, because developers will be writing for new generations, and porting to hardware with a slower GPU speed is more effort than it's worth.
Registered developers can do sideloading, no info yet if that will continue to work. Or if it will be possible for users to register as Oculus developers in the future or if that is shut down as well.
If hardware can still be used there are generally people around who continue to use it in some way. And the hardware of the Oculus was pretty nice actually (even if many here don't seem to like it because of only 3-dof).
Despite my desire to have open systems everywhere, I think this issue falls more under the bucket of being an early adopter of a technology. New tech can always die like that.
But of course we need the early adopters, otherwise things never evolve to the point of being mature, so thanks to early adopters for being our guinea pigs.
To my view, pretty much everybody buying VR headsets today is still an early adopter :)
I don't know about Palm as I never had one. But I can still code for my first Android phone. And I do not ask for support, but for opening up sideloading so users can install apps from PC when the shop closes.
You do like hardware getting locked down for development less than 2 years after it's release? (edit: OK, a bit over 2 years - 31. May 2018, still not that old)
I don't care about the shop. I just wish people could continue to develop for it as it is (or now was...) a pretty fun device to experiment with VR.
I haven't seen that tool yet (been a few months since I developed for Oculus), so I can't tell yet anything about that (and looks like a Mac app from screenshot, so not sure if it'll work for me).
The first solution described there needs users to register as developer (not just unlock it as in Android phones) and being able to use adb. We will have to see if that continues to work. No info about that yet. It's definitely not completely disconnected from the online stuff. For example - when the system needs updates you can't do any development in that time (I learned about that when after some weeks pause it prevented me completely from developing for nearly a full day because of outstanding updates).
The second solution is using the shop which as the as described by the original article will be shut down and not even updates to existing apps will be possible anymore.
