Meta moves on from the metaverse

gm legends. It’s Sunday.

This week: Meta cuts its metaverse losses, a fun way to visualize financial markets, how to make your product visible to AI, and why the App Store doesn’t want vibe coding apps. Plus, five of our favorite launches from the past week. 

The metaverse may be gone, but we’re still here, legend. And so are you. Enjoy.

P.S. Launching soon? We’d love to hear about it → editorial@producthunt.co 🫶

In 2021, Facebook changed its name to Meta. That’s how invested Mark Zuckerberg was in the metaverse, a still-to-be-constructed digital world people could immerse themselves in via avatars.

Five years and $80 billion later, Meta is winding down its metaverse. It announced last week it would be shutting down its VR game Horizon Worlds. (It later decided to continue supporting existing games.)

Those who have been reading the tea leaves have seen this coming for a while. Zuckerberg’s commitment to building a metaverse meant he couldn’t go all-in on AI, which took off a year later with the introduction of ChatGPT. 

Half measures didn’t work. Meta’s own open-source model, Llama, failed to make the same impact as ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude (which launched Dispatch this week); it’s since been put out to pasture. 

So the company behind Facebook started pivoting again, spending big on AI talent by poaching from its competitors. Meanwhile, it started pruning the metaverse. It kicked off 2026 by laying off 1,000 people from a metaverse division and shuttering three VR studios. 

But it still has some major catching up to do on AI. Last year, it decided to ditch its frontier model, Behemoth, and start over with a closed-source model. Now, that new LLM, Avocado, is being held back after testing showed it’s not ready for primetime.

That’s reality for you. 

By DeepMarket

Imagine if a financial ecosystem looked like an environmental ecosystem. That’s what DeepWater has built. It tracks the prices and volumes of several hundred cryptocurrencies by visualizing them as sea creatures under the ocean. 

DeepWater writes: 

“Bitcoin is a kraken on the ocean floor. Ethereum is a blue whale. Meme coins are jellyfish near the surface. Every creature's behavior — its depth, speed, glow, the way it moves — is driven by live Binance data.”

Even the weather is intentional, with market volatility showing up as a storm at sea.

DeepMarket says:

“The idea started because I found traditional dashboards exhausting. Walls of numbers and candlestick charts are powerful tools, but they never gave me an intuitive sense of what the market was actually doing. I wanted something I could glance at and just feel whether things were calm or chaotic.”

By Imed Radhouani, co-founder and CTO of Rankfender

Six months ago, I launched a product. Beautiful landing page. Great onboarding. Real customers. Solid retention.

One problem: AI never mentioned it.

Not in ChatGPT. Not in Perplexity. Not in Gemini. We were invisible. And I didn't know why. So I spent the next 6 months reverse-engineering the answer. Here's what I learned.

According to The Information, Apple isn’t allowing AI vibe coding mobile apps like Replit and Vibecode to release updates on the App Store unless they make changes. The issue, explains hunter Rohan Chaubey, is that Apple doesn’t want “AI-generated apps that run and evolve inside another app” because builders can do an end run around Apple’s review process. 

So, if the App Store won’t let you see the hottest vibe coding apps, we will.

In addition to the aforementioned Replit, which launched animated videos last month, and Claude-powered Vibecode, here are a few app-builders you might want to check out:

• Base44, an app-builder that requires no coding skills, launched its backend platform for agentic building in February.
• Lovable is a full-stack engineer that you might just love.
• Solid is a solid option for building web apps and websites.
• Softr, a 2022 Golden Kitty runner-up, creates customized business apps from your spreadsheets.
• Reflex is an open-source framework for Python devs looking to ship web apps.
• Dreamflow allows you to use AI prompts, mess around with the UI visually, and code when you want to.

(By the way, Cursor, the quintessential AI code editor, came out with its “frontier-level coding model” Composer 2 just this weekend.)