Oculus Quest: Downloading Mods and Unofficial Games

So, you just picked up an Oculus Quest. Congratulations! This piece of hardware has serious power packed into such a small package, and there are more ways than one to unlock the full features of the Oculus Quest. Sure, you can go into the Oculus Store and buy plenty of great games, curated for the Quest. But, there is... a darker path. A path less traveled, one full of risks that offers great reward: Sideloading.

In layman’s terms, Sideloading onto the Oculus Quest is just installing unofficial content onto your system. There are a few ways to do it, thanks to Oculus’s choice to run the Quest on a variation of Android. If you’re familiar with Android devices, then you’ve already got a head start. If not, don’t let anything technical here concern you, it’s quite the simple process all things considered.

The first thing you’re going to need is a USB-C Cable to plug your Quest into your PC. The cable that comes with your Quest could work, as long as your PC has a USB-C port. Otherwise, you’re going to need the proper cable. If you’re considering using Oculus Link, cables that work for that will work for this purpose. Otherwise, most charger cables for recent Android phones will work just as well.

Once you’ve got a cable ready, you’re going to need to download a special service: SideQuest. This is your marketplace and your installation service. Without SideQuest, it would be a lot harder to get reliable off-market content onto your system. SideQuest can be downloaded right HERE, and once you’ve installed it you’re well on your way to finishing this up. While SideQuest is installed on your computer, its time to make sure you can actually download and install apps off SideQuest.

To enable sideloading apps, you first need to head over to https://dashboard.oculus.com/ and “Create an Organization.” This will lead you down a short path to creating a development organization. Don’t worry, you don’t actually need to develop anything. This is just a required step in enabling the headset’s Developer Mode, which is the only way to enable sideloading. Once you’ve gone through the process and agreed to the Developer Agreement, you need to head over to https://developer.oculus.com to download the drivers. This link is to drivers for the Oculus Go, but they work for SideQuest and the Oculus Quest.

Before continuing, I need to go through an important piece of troubleshooting. If you have ever been a developer for Android devices, or downloaded any sort of Android device management system, you may need to uninstall those services to properly enable SideQuest and the Oculus drives.

Once you’ve created your development organization and downloaded the proper drivers, you need to enable Developer Mode. In order to do this, you need to head over to the Oculus app on your phone. There, if you click on settings, then your Quest, and then click on “More Settings,” you should see a setting labeled “Developer Mode.”  Once you’ve gone through this, it’s in your best interest to quickly restart your Quest before continuing.

This is where that USB-C cable from earlier comes in. Officially, SideQuest recommends using a phone cable in place of the Oculus provided cable, but you should be safe to use any USB-C cable you have. Just plug your Quest into your PC, and quickly throw the headset on. If you’ve done everything right, the headset should be displaying a screen like this:

That’s it! If you’ve followed all these steps without issues, you should be free to pick up whatever you want from SideQuest and install it on your Oculus Quest!

Tyler Krasnai
Editor, NoobFeed
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