[PerkinWarwick]

The underlying question is 'what would it take to break the device free'.

[volta83]

Can't answer that question, but suppose you break it free, then what ?

It would be like maintaining a separate appstore for iPhones.

[soylentcola]

I recall that being the case when I had an old gen2 iPad and wanted to do a few things that weren't sanctioned/supported by Apple. There were a few well-known repos for homebrew software and that's where I got the handful of useful tweaks and customizations for that (jailbroken) tablet.

I guess the issue there is that the popularity of the platform and nature of its limitations made it worth someone's trouble to maintain those repos. With something like an Oculus, I don't know that there are enough users (and also a sufficient subset that want to avoid Facebook or run some unsanctioned software) to justify the effort.

[PerkinWarwick]

Perhaps as a hobbyist device, there's certainly a lot of interesting apps that could be written.

I'm assuming here that it is somehow subsidized (via volume or via data mining) and is cheaper than alternatives.