Google Daydream was phone-in-headset VR — and nobody wanted it

Google Daydream was a virtual reality platform announced at Google I/O in May 2016 and launched in November 2016 with the Daydream View headset. Unlike the cheaper Cardboard, Daydream was a high-end mobile VR platform with a controller, a fabric headset, and a curated store. It was Google's bet that smartphone VR would become a mainstream computing platform.

The platform never gained traction. Developers did not build for it because there were not enough users; users did not buy the headsets because there were not enough apps. The chicken-and-egg problem was compounded by the hardware requirements — only a handful of phones (starting with the Pixel) were Daydream-compatible, and by 2018 most phone makers had stopped supporting it. Google itself admitted that 'asking people to put their phone in a headset and lose access to the apps they use throughout the day causes immense friction.'

Google discontinued the Daydream View headset in October 2019 and stopped certifying new phones. Android 11 dropped support for the platform entirely in 2020. The failure was part of a broader pattern of Google launching ambitious platforms and abandoning them when adoption was slow, leaving developers who had invested in the ecosystem without a platform.