“Do people actually care about mixed reality?”

This is probably the most common question I’ve been asked over the past 6 months—by friends, colleagues, and my parents.

It’s a fair question. The hype cycle has been all over the place. Remember Google Glass? Magic Leap? Even the term “mixed reality” feels like it’s still settling into its final form.

But my short answer is: yes—people do care.

And not just because I care. In this post, I wanted to lay out the data and experiences that have led me to that conclusion, with a bit of context from my own journey building ReactVision.

From curious to obsessed

I’ve been interested in AR/VR since 2014. Like many in tech, I’ve dipped in and out of the space over the years, playing with new headsets and following the product drops. But something shifted for me in September 2024.

That’s when I tipped over from “this is cool” to “this is inevitable and I want to be part of building it.”

I’d been playing with the Apple Vision Pro and it absolutely blew my mind. Genuinely magical. Around the same time, Snap launched Spectacles 5 along with their new operating system, SnapOS, which has an Android-based kernel and immediately got me thinking about how ViroReact could run on it. Then Meta showed off their Orion glasses, which, while still in development, were getting great early reviews.

All of this came in quick succession, and it wasn’t just Big Tech either. Suddenly, I was seeing smart glasses startups cropping up all over the place. After years of talk, 2024 felt like the year mixed reality hardware actually moved forward in a meaningful, visible way.

The blog post that kept growing

Around the same time, my app development company Morrow, published a blog post:

“How to build an augmented reality (AR) app with Expo and ReactVision (formerly NativeVision)”

We expected it to get a little traction, especially with devs who follow our work.

But here’s what happened: even after we stopped promoting it on social media, traffic just kept growing. It’s now our second most popular blog post across everything we’ve written in that time—and it’s still being shared on X, Reddit, and dev forums.

The ReactVision data

So in December 2024, I made the decision to go all-in on this. We took over ReactVision, the home of open-source XR dev ViroReact, with a clear mission:

Make it the best cross-platform developer tool for AR/VR, period.

When I stepped in, ViroReact was sitting at a stable 1.7k–1.9k monthly downloads. Solid, but quiet.

Fast forward to today:

• March: 21k+ downloads

• April: 20k+ (with days still to go)

• The Discord is growing weekly, and we’re seeing more activity, feedback, and experimentation from devs around the world.

And this is just for mobile AR/VR support. We haven’t even launched Vision Pro or Quest support yet (it’s coming). But the demand is there.

So… do people care?

Yes.

Because they’re building.

Because they’re searching.

Because they’re already here—they’re just waiting for the tools to catch up with their ideas.

Mixed reality might not be mainstream just yet, but the early signs are very real. If you build dev tools, like we do at ReactVision, you start to notice where attention is going. And right now? A growing number of developers really care about building immersive things—and they’re doing it in React Native.

So yeah, people care. And it’s only just getting started.

—

If you’re one of those developers already building in this space, come hang out in the ReactVision Discord.

And if you’re not building yet, maybe this is your sign.

The Perfect Storm of Delays

1. One-Person Engine Room

Eduardo’s our sole full-time engineer on ReactVision right now, and he’s a rockstar. But humans get sick—it happens—and when he was out this week, progress stalled. We’re a small team, and that’s a bottleneck. We’re slowly onboarding the wider Morrow crew, but getting new engineers up to speed is a slog. Side note: our onboarding process itself is getting a serious overhaul to make this smoother - but again, takes time.

2. Bug Hunting Is a Marathon

This update is all about squashing bugs, and these aren’t quick fixes. They’re sneaky, tangled issues that take time to track down, diagnose, fix, test, and then test again. It’s not glamorous, but it’s critical—and it’s eaten up weeks.

3. Scope Creep (My Bad)

I’ll own this one. Every time a user reports a new issue, I think, “Oh, that’s tied to what we’re already fixing.” Then we dig in, and nope—it’s a whole new beast. I’ve been pushing to address everything in one go because I hate seeing users get frustrated. But that’s ballooned the release. I’ve finally drawn a line: no more additions to 2.43.0. New issues go to the next round.

Where We’re At

ReactVision 2.43.0 is nearly there. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s solid progress—bug fixes that’ll make your experience better. I just wish it hadn’t taken this long.

Fixing the Future

I’m not sitting still on this. Here’s what I’m working on:

• Team Expansion: We’re refining how we bring Morrow engineers into ReactVision. It’s slow now, but I want a system where new devs can hit the ground running.

• Smarter Bug Triage: I need to get better at prioritizing fixes without letting scope creep derail us. That starts with sticking to my “no more additions” rule.

• Buffer for Life: Eduardo’s illness was a reminder—single points of failure hurt. We’re going to build in more redundancy, even if it’s gradual.

Am I frustrated? Yeah. But I’m also fired up to crack this. Thanks for sticking with us—2.43.0 is coming soon, and it’ll be worth it. Do you have any thoughts on how we can speed things up? I’m all ears.

Where We Stand Today

Right now, ReactVision is funded through Morrow’s profits, which was always part of the plan. We’re in a good position to continue this throughout the year. But if we can successfully monetise ReactVision, it would not only secure the project’s resources independently of our broader business but also allow us to move beyond mostly maintenance with occasional features. Our goal is to be regularly adding exciting new features (per community requirements), speeding up our release cycles, and squashing bugs even faster.

Short-Term Solution: Development Services

The most obvious short-term approach is something we’re already working on—offering development services. Morrow is well-known as a service provider, and since we already help companies and startups build apps with React Native, expanding into AR development (through React Native) feels like a natural next step. In fact, we’re already in talks with several companies interested in leveraging our expertise for their AR projects.

This model has its perks. It could even lead to companies paying us to add features they need into the library. However, it comes with some challenges too—sales cycles tend to be slow and unpredictable, and there’s a risk that our AR resources might end up tied up servicing clients rather than focusing on the libraries themselves.

Beyond Services: Other Monetisation Ideas

Donations:

Many open-source projects rely on donations to fuel their development. Pairing donations with revenues from our service offerings might provide ReactVision with the extra boost it needs. On the flip side, since ReactVision is currently a project within the larger Morrow ecosystem, donations might not resonate as well with the community as they would for a standalone project.

Premium Hosted Services:

Another intriguing option is to create a premium offering—similar to how Supabase is open-source and allows free self-hosting but charges for their hosted service. With this approach, we’d keep the core open-source libraries free, while our premium, deeply integrated offerings become the revenue engine. This model could even transition ReactVision from being a project under Morrow to a standalone business. Personally, I believe this is the most promising long-term route. In the meantime, development services will serve as our short-term solution.

I’ve been reaching out to founders in the AR space and those who’ve built businesses around open-source projects to gather feedback and insights on these ideas. If you have experience in either area, please reach out—I’d love to chat.

In Conclusion

For now, we plan to kick things off with Morrow’s service offerings. Looking ahead, though, I’m leaning toward building a premium offering that can scale up our resources and further accelerate ReactVision’s development.

Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to explore these options!

How We Got Here

First, let’s rewind to how we got here. Towards the end of last year, many users of the ViroReact library began to worry that the project was dying and would soon be unsupported. At the start of this year, I started receiving emails from concerned users—even though we weren’t the owners at the time, our previous involvement meant people naturally reached out, wondering if we could do something about it.

As it turns out, we were already working on a solution. In early January, Eduardo and I made a plan for Morrow to take over ReactVision and pay him to maintain it full-time. While it took a few weeks to finalise everything, Eduardo didn’t waste any time. He dove in and began addressing issues head-on, which quickly renewed interest in the project. You only have to look at the rising NPM installs to see the community’s engagement reawakening even before our first major update.

So, two weeks in, how’s it going?

The Current Landscape

Overall, things are looking up. There’s a real buzz in the community and an undeniable sense of optimism that has energised me about the future of ReactVision. The support and enthusiasm from the wider community have been incredible fuel for our ongoing efforts.

That said, we’re still finding our feet. For instance, you might have noticed that our GitHub release versioning and NPM versioning are currently out of sync. We’ve been so focused on shipping out updates that some of our standard processes have slipped a bit. Rest assured, we’re on it and expect everything to be in line by our next update, which should roll out within the next week.

The Realities of Open Source

Running an open-source project isn’t always glamorous—it can be a thankless task. I already knew this from our other OSS projects at Morrow, and ReactVision, being our largest undertaking so far, is no exception, and expectations can sometimes run sky-high. While we prioritise fixing the most widely reported issues, every now and then, a unique, niche problem pops up that might not affect most users. We will always try and fix every issue, but when you’re operating with a small team, you need to prioritise the bigger issues and feature requests, which can leave some users frustrated. I get it—I’ve been that frustrated developer in the past.

The truth is, Morrow’s resources are limited, and while we’re moving as fast as we can, it can be disheartening when the urgency isn’t fully understood by everyone. The challenge for me is accepting that while we might not fix every niche issue overnight, we remain committed to tackling the big problems, rolling out new features, and improving the overall project steadily.

Looking Ahead

When it comes to development resources, we’re investing more than ever into ReactVision. Still, I know that this effort alone won’t fully realise our vision. I know we need to be able to generate revenue from this project to enable us to put more resources into it. In the short term, our plan for revenue generation is to offer paid support, helping teams integrate and build with ReactVision more smoothly. Down the line, I’d love to explore building a paid version or offering premium tools on top of ReactVision, though whether this happens under Morrow or through a new entity within the OddVentures family is still up in the air.

In Conclusion

Things are definitely moving in the right direction, and I’m personally really enjoying the challenge. There’s still a long way to go, but I’m excited about the space we’re in and the role we’re playing in it. I can’t wait to see where we take ReactVision next.

Stay tuned for more updates, and thanks for being a part of this journey!