KEY TAKES:

• Meta will help other Facebook apps flourish independently of the Facebook Name.
• Meta will help acquire more VR developers by showing how determined they are to fulfill this dream.
• Reality Labs projects will be open-sourced, just like Facebook’s Watchman, CacheLib, or React.
• The writer worked in Facebook ads marketing and as a mobile app developer.

I have seen multiple takes about this rebranding subject amid growing outrage over Facebook’s now Meta’s Instagram app to be harmful to teenagers and other “whistle-blowers” or “leakers,” depending on who you ask.

To the naked eye, it might seem like they are running away from problems by rebranding. But to the clothed eye, it looks like Facebook, the brand, was dragging down all the apps in the FFA, also known as the Facebook Family of Apps. We have seen what Google has done with the alphabet, making all the aspects of the company’s branches flourish, including YouTube, Google, Maps, Android, etc. The strategy is to detach other apps from Facebook’s name and make them independent. Make Instagram appealing to the declining teenage base and allow it to stand alone.

With the name change, Facebook also introduced or marketed its reality labs which encompass VR and AR. This is a real visionary and exciting space to be in, and one might think Facebook’s hiring of developers to work on something even more intrusive to our lives would be horrendous. The only solution would be to rebrand the same workplace, same employees and different names on the building. Kill two birds with one stone, help other apps flourish independently, and show developers you are not playing this time. This is for real.

They also announced their new vision of VR and AR to be open sourced, I have used Facebook open-source libraries, and they are great, for example, React, Watchman, and CacheLib. React is essentially and JS framework that’s components based more robust than Vue or Angular. So if they make this VR open-sourced, devs are essentially getting paid to do something they would have done for free.

Disclaimer: This whole opinion article might seem like I support Facebook on everything. I tried to look at it from Facebook’s point of view without being overly biased because I worked in marketing to scale my mobile apps, which entailed using Facebook to launch marketing campaigns.