The Google Daydream View project is no more. Hard to say this but some VR headset sales stopped. We shared this in October last year and it’s not clear yet as to what the future of virtual reality headsets will look like. We still believe VR has the potential to become bigger and more useful together with AR but companies need to make adjustments. It seems like only a few years ago when Google Daydream was introduced. This time, we may live in a world where compatibility is not important.
By not important we mean it’s no longer popular. We’re not sure what’s happening but for the Samsung Galaxy S9, Daydream has stopped working with the smartphone. Samsung nor Google didn’t make any official announcement about the change.
Daydream no longer works on the Android 10-upgraded Galaxy S9+. The Galaxy S9 and Galaxy Note 9 also don’t work with Daydream. This happened only when Android 10 OS update rolled out for the Galaxy S9, Note 9, and Galaxy S9+.
We’re not sure if this is an official move by Samsung but it seems not many people are happy with it. When tried with a Daydream headset, the phone shows this message: Incompatible phone. A Daydream-ready phone is required. Visit the Daydream Help Centre for more information. It seems the VR headset doesn’t recognize the said smartphone model running Android 10. It used to work perfectly with Android 9 and Android 8 so there must be an Android 10 compatibility issue.
According to some devs, the ‘android.hardware.vr.high_performance’ is not defined on Android 10. It could just be for the said Samsung devices because Pixel phones have no problem running Daydream VR wit Android 10. Let’s wait and see for either Samsung or Android to explain what’s been happening.
