TechPrufer
Get started
Meta
Meta logoMeta · Feature trail

Mobile Configuration Management for Mixed Reality Devices

1 post · Feb 2023 – Jun 2024

What this trail covers

Meta's MobileConfig platform has been extended to support mixed reality (MR) devices, including Meta Quest and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. This expansion addresses configuration challenges in MR ecosystems with longer development cycles and shared configuration needs across multiple apps. The platform has been adapted to run on various architectures, including microcontrollers, with optimizations for limited connectivity and scarce resources. This enables feature flagging, A/B testing, and remote control of device behavior.

All Meta trails
  1. Unlocking the power of mixed reality devices with MobileConfigThis post details the expansion of Meta's MobileConfig platform to support mixed reality (MR) devices like Meta Quest and Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. It describes the configuration challenges in MR ecosystems, such as extended development cycles and shared configuration needs across multiple apps. The solution involved centralizing configuration requests through a single Android service (MobileConfigService) for lightweight clients, enabling session-based configs, and allowing for experimentation across multiple apps. Libraries were built on top of MobileConfig for platforms like Windows. For low-powered devices and microcontrollers, MobileConfig libraries were repurposed with reduced memory footprints and optimized authoring flows. Technologies like IPC and SPI are used to sync configuration values to various components in multi-architecture devices. The system also addresses limited connectivity by optimizing syncs and using customized IPC APIs to reduce memory and CPU usage, enabling dynamic configuration sets and OS-level experimentation with AOSP Java and Native APIs.
  2. The evolution of Facebook’s iOS app architectureThis post details the evolution of Facebook's iOS app architecture over 10 years, highlighting key technical decisions and their impact. It covers the shift from Core Data to a custom declarative UI and data model (ComponentKit), the introduction of dynamically loaded libraries (dylibs) to manage app size and startup time, and the integration with Buck for build-time code analysis and generation. The post emphasizes the trade-offs made between end-user experience, developer experience, and speed, and how these decisions shaped the app's complex, multi-language codebase.