Meta Developers

Release channels let you distribute early versions of your builds to limited audiences for testing or other purposes. You can create public channels for users to subscribe to, or invite different groups of people to private release channels. When you are confident your app is ready for release, you can then copy your build to the Production channel and submit it for app review.

Alpha, Beta, Release Candidate channels

You can upload any build of your app to any release channel using the Meta Quest Developer Hub or the Oculus Platform Utility. Uploading to a release channel indicates that you are ready to release it to an audience even if that audience is a group of internal testers. Because of this, all uploaded apps, even alpha builds, must meet the release packaging requirements for your platform.

By default, apps come with the following release channels:

Production: This is a public facing release channel, either through the Meta Horizon Store.
RC: An invite only release channel for your app’s release candidates.
BETA: An invite only release channel for beta testing your app.
ALPHA: An invite only release channel for early alpha testing of your app.

Initially, the Alpha, Beta, and Release Candidate channels are empty and contain no users—not even yourself. You can:

Mark a channel as public, and let users subscribe themselves
Invite users into a channel

Apps distributed through release channels appear in the My Preview Apps section of the user’s app Library.

Note

All uploaded apps, even alpha builds, must meet the release packaging requirements for your platform. Uploading an app to a release channel indicates that you are ready to release it to an audience even if that audience is a group of internal testers.

Production channel and app review

The Production channel does not have subscribers. The name displayed for this channel is Production (Store) depending on the type of app. When you place a build in this channel for the first time, nothing happens until after you enter the Submission Info and click Submit for Review to start the review process. For more information on the review process, see Submission Guidelines: Preparing for App Review.

After your app is published on the Meta Horizon Store, users can access your app’s product description page by way of a direct URL, or find it with an exact name search in the Store. If your app is a Store app, users can browse and find your app in the Store.

Any new builds of an approved app that you copy to the Production channel trigger an update for all users who are entitled to download the release version of your app. See Updating a Published App.

View and manage your release channels

You can view and manage the state of your release channels at any time by viewing the Release Channels page for your app:

Go to the Meta Quest Developer Dashboard.
Select your app.
In the left-side navigation, click Distribution > Release Channels.

If you are a Meta Quest for Business developer, the Release Channels page separates release channels into Business and Store sections. The following image shows an example:

This section provides topics that enable you to complete the following tasks:

Upload Builds to a Release Channel: Shows you how to upload a build to your release channel.
Add Users to a Release Channel: Describes how to make a channel public or how to invite up to 200 users to release channels by email invitation.
Copy Builds Between Release Channels: Describes how to copy a build to another release channel to expose it to a new set of testers or users.
Add Custom Release Channels: Shows how to create additional release channels if you need more.

Did you find this page helpful?