Yesterday we announced the public availability of Minsar Studio on the Oculus Quest through App Lab. Even though we have a lot of work to do to improve the app, this was a major milestone we wanted to celebrate and share with all of you.
Which begs the question: how do we share the app? How do we make it easily accessible, from a Tweet, an Instagram post, a Slack message or an email?
Search from Store and install
If the user is patient and have their Quest already, they can go in the Oculus Store and search for the exact name of the app. In our case, the user would have to type exactly “Minsar Studio”. Our name is simple but a longer or more complex name would make things more difficult. Typing text in VR is rather slow and can make you lose a potential user.
When the app appears in the search results, you’ll notice its thumbnail won’t be visible until you actively select it, which also slows down discovery. All things considered we appreciate this possibility but it’s not the best one.
Direct link on mobile
This scenario implies the user is logged with their Oculus/Facebook account on either their phone’s web browser or at least in the Oculus mobile app, and that the account is the same on both mobile and headset.
The Store page of your title has a blue call-to-action button, which in many cases will be named “Free”. This will redirect you to the Oculus app. The Oculus app on mobile can be really useful to quickly discover apps and games to install on your Quest. The great news is you can also use it to install an App Lab app or game.
Next time you use your Quest, the App Library will suggest you to download & install the app!
Direct link in the Quest
Another straightforward way to download and install the app is to open the Oculus browser in the Quest, and type the URL that gets you to the (App Lab or Official) Store page.
However the URL provided by Oculus isn’t really explicit and quite long, so it wouldn’t make sense typing it.
Ours is https://www.oculus.com/experiences/quest/3070868589682594/ and doesn’t even feature the name of the app!
Which brings us to the last part of this blogpost. ⬇️
Treat your URL as UI & UX: get your .quest domain!
As the great Scott Hanselman says “URLs are UI”. URLs should be short, understandable and shareable. This obviously includes your domain name. Ours is minsar.app (or minsar.studio) to let you quickly understand we’re an app, not a services company or anything else.
Earlier this month, the .quest TLD has been made generally available. We highly recommend you to register your own domain name! It will help convey the idea you’re available on Quest, which is currently the most popular VR device.
We have then registered the Minsar.quest domain name, which allows users to easily type it in their (VR or mobile) browser. It helps quickly understand that Minsar is available on Quest, and looks nice in an email, a direct message, or a bio on Instagram.
Even Facebook did it so I guess you should too. 😉
