20:25 vision: Meta Connect looks to the post-smartphone future

Meta Connect 2025 (September 17-18) went all out on glasses and AI, outlining an idealistic future – although brought down to earth throughout by bugs and “WIFI troubles” (per TechCrunch). To align with the public announcements of upgrades, pricing, and new features, Meta has also been pushing the glasses across its social platforms. There’s also been a strong creator campaign, where creators are incentivised to use and review the glasses (ideally also promoting new use cases for them).

The broader campaign indicates that Meta is counting on glasses sales to cement its place as the new portal to the digital world. Rather than join the smartphone market race, it plans to beat it to the next event entirely. The timing is good, especially with the latest Apple event and iPhone announcement – once a keystone event – getting mixed interest compared to previous announcements.

Meta is gunning for the post-smartphone future – to mixed success 

However, the hard push also indicates that organic pickup of the glasses on their own may not be meeting expectations. There’s a broader pattern here that highlights tension. The glasses are being pushed much in the same way voice speakers once were: as a product that the company wants to be popular for its own reasons, but not necessarily something consumers are finding organically useful at a mainstream scale. The push for AI is similarly something that companies across the board are betting big on. Yet the developmental priority is to make them sound smooth and be easy to engage with, not necessarily on making them practically functional. It’s all-in on the packaging, while falling behind on the product.

This isn’t all on Meta. The company is just best positioned to take advantage of the fact that social platforms are the current default portals to the digital world. Offering products like glasses and AI as native to those platforms is the optimal space to benefit from both current infrastructural importance and future opportunities. The viability of those future opportunities is something for the whole market to take into careful consideration, not Meta alone.

What does the digital experience look like in 2035?

There may be a bigger trend at play here – one that could make an entirely different sector better placed to win the future.  Social platforms are becoming awash in polished creator content, ads, and AI-generated everything. They are increasingly being used for entertainment, not meaningful interaction. Yet in order to be the link between the real world and the digital one, users must have agency, community, and spaces to interact in a deeper, emotionally vulnerable way. Social still offers this to an extent, but it is becoming a feature rather than a focus.

Meanwhile, Gen Alpha is growing up with Roblox and Fortnite as the places they jump on after school to talk to and play with their friends. In contrast to social, games worlds offer distinct, nuanced experience where the player is in control, and can choose between a huge variety of experiences – which are versatile across mobile, desktop, and console, as well as being the primary use cases for new VR headset technology.

In games worlds, users can play music, make videos, form friendships, and build skills and clout through rankings. They can choose a quiet farming experience one day, jump into a sci-fi thriller the next, and then switch over to trying their hand at car theft in Miami a la Grand Theft Auto– all in the context of a community, and with their choices, not their passive preferences, the driving force of the experience.

Social has really only been the default digital experience for the last few years. While social is not going anywhere, anytime soon, as Gen Alpha ages up, the future interface with the digital world may be Fortnite, not Facebook.