Damn. If Meta is this scared of Apple’s headset then it’s going to have a bad time finding developers. I can’t imagine a device that costs ~$3.5k usd is that much of a threat to Meta’s market share
They're probably not scared of the Vision Pro, they're probably scared of whatever comes after. Apple has a history of being able to take established tech and make it so user-friendly (for the casual user, not the power users) that your grandmother could use it. I think that's what they're afraid of. I think they're scared that they're the BlackBerry and Apple's gearing up to launch the iPhone.
Their Reality Labs division loses billions every year. They are going to be the BlackBerry whether they like it or not. Absolutely idiotic for a social media company to get into the hardware business.
Facebook / Meta is one of the few data hoarding companies that doesn't have "full control" of how their products are consumed / used and how much data gets collected in which way.
Apple has the Mac, TV, Watch, and iPhone platforms. Google has the Pixels, Android, and Nests, Amazon has Kindles, Fire, Alexa devices, and so on.
Facebook doesn't have any of these. The best they can do today is being a parasitic add-on to a platform they have no total control over like "the others" do.
Making their own hardware is a key element, not a burden. But they're still treating it like the latter.
If the Metaverse would already have been the New Thing (tm), they'd have been the quasi-dominators of that territory because they're pioneering the hard- and software.
But along came AI which doesn't need it's own hardware platform, and still nobody wants to live in the Metaverse.
The more likely reason for blacklisting the developer is to cause a chilling effect on other developers. Apple has one of the best developer ecosystems and Meta is likely terrified of letting their developers anywhere near Apple. Having good apps is so important to a platform