During the recent holiday season, a significant number of new Quest 3 and 3S headsets experienced issues with updating, causing frustration for users who were left with malfunctioning VR headsets. Meta has now shed light on the situation, revealing that the problem was not due to a faulty update as initially suspected.
Mark Rabkin, Meta’s Vice President of VR/MR, addressed the issue on X, explaining that a rare bug in the read/write file system of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) was to blame for the update failures. This bug, which has been undetected for years, caused file corruption during the update process, resulting in some Quest devices becoming unusable.
Rabkin described the bug as a “race condition,” where the outcome depends on the timing of events, making it difficult to reproduce consistently. Despite the bug being several years old, it went unnoticed until the recent influx of new Quest devices.
After identifying and fixing the bug, Meta has taken steps to prevent similar issues in the future by contributing the fix to the broader AOSP. Additionally, Meta does not allow OS rollbacks on Quest devices, making it challenging for users to revert to a previous software version.
Although Quest users can sideload content using privately-distributed APKs like other Android devices, the device’s security measures make it difficult for users to modify the system. Attempts to jailbreak Quest devices in the past have faced obstacles, with no widely publicized jailbreak available for Quest 3 at present.
In the past, efforts to jailbreak Quest devices have been debunked, with claims that certain methods used virtual machines to bypass security measures. Despite these challenges, the VR community continues to explore ways to customize and enhance the Quest experience.
