All this time, we were all worried about the wrong app getting renamed, it wasn’t the Facebook app but Oculus that will get a name change!
On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg finally revealed “Meta”, the new brand name for Facebook and to mark the transition of the company from a mere social media platform to a whole new “metaverse”, connecting people virtually and physically all in one. This new name strategy did not sit well with a lot of people, simply because they were all accustomed with Facebook’s iconic blue and white “f” symbol and it was hard to imagine it with a new supervillain’s evil lair name and an infinity symbol (Come on, that’s what most of you thought about it anyway)
Thankfully, the Facebook app is not getting renamed or re-designed as Zuckerberg announced that “the names of the apps that we build—Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp—will remain the same.” But if you look again, you’ll see that Zuckerberg didn’t add Oculus in the list and the reason is simple: the virtual-reality headset is the one getting rebranded. (Better Oculus than Facebook amirite?)
Andrew Bosworth, Facebook’s executive who heads the company’s VR and AR division announced in a Facebook post that the Facebook-made Oculus Quest VR headset would be renamed as the Meta Quest and the app will be called the Meta App. With this news, it’s finally time to say goodbye to Oculus, as a brand name that is. “When people buy our products, we want them to clearly understand that all of these devices come from Meta and ladder up to our metaverse vision,” Bosworth wrote.
“We all have a strong attachment to the Oculus brand, and this was a very difficult decision to make. While we’re changing the brand of the hardware, Oculus will continue to be a core part of our DNA and will live on in things like software and developer tools,” he added.
Well there you have it. You can stop worrying about having to switch to the new name, Meta when addressing Facebook because even with a new name and identity, the features are still the same and your data is as secure as it was before. *smirk*