Google opens up its Daydream VR platform to all developers

After a couple months of restricting development on Daydream, Google has opened the floodgates, now allowing anyone to submit an app or experience for the company’s mobile VR platform.

Previously, the company had worked with a select group of partners to build out apps for the platform, assumedly to give developers interested in Daydream a taste of what works well on it.

Apps and games from Jaunt, Within, Lucid Sight and others were first to make the store, now Google is ready to share some key requirements and let the devs go wild with Daydream. The majority of these stipulations focus on user comfort, ensuring that users are the ones directing the camera and that the horizon line stays stable during experiences.

Daydream is currently only available on a few phones (the Google Pixel and Pixel XL are the most notable), but more and more handsets are gaining the Daydream certification that opens up users of the handsets to high-quality, low-latency VR on a mobile device. With this news from Google, there are sure to be quite a bit more apps invading the store that will give the first crop of Daydream users a lot to test out.

Competing platforms like Samsung’s Gear VR already have had more than a year to build out mobile VR content but given the reach of the Google Play store and the breadth of compatible devices that are promised, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Google catch up rather quickly in terms of available titles.