SideQuest has always been the best way to get games for the Oculus Quest headset outside of
the official Oculus Quest store. However, you’ve always had to set it up with a PC,
which isn’t always ideal as it tethers you to the PC to get app updates and download new games.
Well, SideQuest recently released an app!
So now you can sideload games to your Oculus Quest headset using just your phone
and a USB cable. You can even sideload the games over wifi!
This will also work with not only the Oculus Quest 2 but the original Oculus Quest as well!
So, here I'm going to take you through what you’ll need to do this and the easy
to follow steps to get it all set up so you’ll be playing your first game in no time at all.
Welcome to My Tech Gear...Let’s get into it!
Now in order to do this you are going to need just three things. You're going to need a mobile phone,
so I've got my Samsung S21 here. You're going to need an Oculus Quest headset. I've got the Quest 2
just sitting behind me. And you're going to need a USB-C cable to connect the two.
I'm using just the USB-C cable that came with the Quest 2.
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Now there is a huge caveat to this working. The SideQuest app is only
available for Android phones. There is not an app for the iPhone. So if you
don't have an Android phone then this isn't going to work for you, sorry.
So, first things first. In order to get SideQuest working with your headset you
are going to need an Oculus developer account, and we're going to do all this from our phone
here. You just need to go into the browser, and you need to go to developer.oculus.com,
and in the top left you want to click on that little hamburger thing, and click on
‘manage’. When you click on ‘manage’ it will ask you to log in. Now you want to log in with
the same account that is registered with your Oculus Quest. Now I'm on the main page I just
need to go and create an organization. Now if you go down to the bottom left there's
an ‘expand sidebar’ icon and you will see your organization in the drop down in the top left.
So I've got ‘myTechGear’ already set up. I set up ‘bananahammock’ as well as a bit of a test.
Anyway, if you don't have an organization set up already you can easily create it from here.
If you've got one you can just select it and you're pretty much ready to go. So to create
one just click on that ‘create’ button, and here on the screen you can see where you actually go
and create an organization name. You can call it whatever you want. You will now need to click on
‘I understand’, and that's basically just saying you agree to the terms of service, which you do.
Then you just click on ‘submit’. There is a non-disclosure agreement here which we need to
agree to, and then click on ‘submit’. And that is your organization set up! Now if you click on that
‘expand’ in the bottom left again you will now see ‘mytechgear3’ was the one that I just created.
Now if you haven't registered an organization name before then you are going to have to
either register a credit card or a phone number as part of getting this set up.
Now this is part of Facebook's terms of service and you can't get around that.
Once your organization is all set up you will now need to enable developer mode on your Quest
headset. So first of all make sure that your Quest headset is on and then you need to open the Oculus
app on your phone. When that's open, click on ‘Devices’ in the bottom right hand side. Now
the Quest headset and the phone should sync up and you should see ‘Connected’ next to your
device that you've got already registered. If you haven't already registered it you need to
do that with the app itself. So with your Quest selected just click on ‘developer mode’ and
then make sure that ‘developer mode’ toggle is on. Once you've done that it is a good idea to
restart the Quest headset just to make sure that that setting takes hold.
So whilst that headset is restarting we're now going to install the SideQuest app on our phone.
So in the Play Store, just search for ‘SideQuest’, and you'll see the SideQuest app
up here. It's actually SideQuest beta at the moment. You can see the SideQuest logo and it's
actually published by ‘SideQuest Ltd’. Install that, and then open it. It gives a little bit
of blurb at the start just saying what the app is intended for. It does say it's intended to be used
over wi-fi although you can transfer games over USB as well. I'll get to that in a little bit.
So now we've got the account set up, and your Quest set up, and we've got the app on our phone,
we're now going to connect the phone to our Quest headset. So just plug the USB-C cable
into your phone and then also plug the other end into your Quest. There we go.
So now it's going to be asking me if I want to accept USB debugging in my headset.
So I need to go into the headset, and just grab my controller, which is just here,
and I want to ‘Allow’ USB debugging. Now it does say ‘do you want to always allow’ from
this computer, which it means your phone in this case. Just click on ‘always’ and then
it won't keep asking you for this every time you go and plug your phone in. It's going to ask you
whether you want to allow data access. You want to say yes to that as well, and again we're going to
select always allow on your phone. It's going to ask you to choose an app for the USB device. Now
it's really important that you get this right. So you want to select ‘SideQuest Installer’
and you can set that to ‘always’ so every time you plug that in it's going to use the SideQuest
app by default with your Quest headset. Now you will notice at the bottom there is a
green dot over the SideQuest icon. That just means that it's connected and we're all good!
Now with that all set up you can just sideload games from the phone to your Quest using the
USB-C cable. Now the developer of the app doesn't recommend you do that though because
it is quite slow and it can significantly drain the battery of your phone. However,
if you just simply don't want to set up wi-fi then you can do it just like this. If you don't
want to set up wi-fi you can skip the next step and go straight to installing a game.
If however you do want to set up wi-fi then it is super easy. So make sure the
phone and your headset are still connected by the USB-C cable. You just need this to set up
the wi-fi connections. Once you've set it up you can unplug it, which i'll get to in a bit.
Now click on the wireless icon in the bottom left and there is a button called ‘enable wi-fi’,
under the wireless mode. So you want to go and click ‘enable wi-fi’
So I should now be able to unplug my phone and you'll notice that the dot on the SideQuest now
turns red. Now if I go back into the wireless section and then click on ‘connect’ it says
‘connected’ pop-up just came up at the bottom of the screen. I would have liked it if that connect
button went green so you can tell a little bit easier. Anyway, if I now go back to the main
screen you'll see that the green dot at the bottom with the SideQuest logo is now green
and I don't have it connected. So it's now using wi-fi to connect my phone to the Quest headset.
When setting this up do make sure that the headset ip address in the wireless mode that's here,
is actually the same as the text box here, under the connect wireless option.
It should be if you've just gone through those steps but it is something that's
worth checking. So that's it! You can now browse games on the app
and then decide which one you want and get it installed on your headset without a cable!
So now let's go and install and play our first game. So I've actually played Gun Raiders before
and I really liked it. I haven't got it on this headset at the moment so I'm just going to go and
install that. So in the SideQuest app you could search using the little magnifying glass at the
top right, or you can actually select the category squares which is on the bottom left next to the
wi-fi option and that'll allow you to search by categories. Like you can search by ‘App Lab”
or ‘Adventure’ or ‘Building’ or ‘Climbing’ and so on and so forth. I'm just going to go and use
Gun Raiders, which is here. So I'm going to click on that. I've got two options
here. ‘Get On Oculus’, I'll get to that in a minute. A SideQuest game will only have
‘Install to headset’. So I'm going to click on ‘install to headset’ and that's added Gun
Raiders to the install list. If you want to see how the progress of that is going,
click on the ‘download’ tab which is in the bottom right, which is the down arrow,
and you'll see a little number next to it at the moment. So that's it downloading and now
installing the app, and it goes to success and it goes green when it's actually finished doing that.
So now the game is installed on a headset we can now go and play it so I'll show you where
you can find it. On your Quest, if you put it on, under your apps library by default you've probably
got ‘All’ selected, but you still won't see your app that you just installed on this list. That's
because Oculus regards what you've just installed as coming from ‘unknown sources’ and so it doesn't
include it in this list. You need to go to the top right, select down, and find that ‘unknown
sources’ label. If you click on that it will now show you the game that you've just installed.
It'll actually show you every game that you've sideloaded from SideQuest. So just click on it,
and that's just going to load it. So now we are all set up with Gun Raiders. It's a game
I thoroughly recommend that you try. So by all means give it a go. It's a crazy hectic game.
So there you go. It's all set up! You have now got games sideloaded
onto your Quest headset. No PC needed. All you needed was a mobile phone!
Now there are some gotchas that you could face when doing this
so here's some quick tips to help you out…
Only phones with USB OTG support (which is On-The-Go support) will be able to activate
wi-fi mode over that USB-C cable. Most modern phones do though so I wouldn't be too worried.
If you are one of the unlucky ones though then you can still install games over the USB-C cable.
If your Quest headset restarts then that will disable the wi-fi connection option
that you just set up. So you will need to reconnect the headset to your phone
over a USB-C cable to re-enable the wi-fi mode. So that's just going back and following Step 5 again.
Now for some games on SideQuest you will notice that there is no ‘Install To Headset’ option
but only a ‘Get On Oculus’ button. Now these are games that are only available on Oculus App Lab
rather than direct from SideQuest, and such don't get directly downloaded and installed
from the SideQuest app. However, if you click on the ‘Get On Oculus’ button then the app will
redirect you to the correct App Lab page so you can install it on your Quest headset.
If you also have the Oculus app installed on the same phone it will even open the
install page in the Oculus app, which is what I've got here. So
if I click on ‘ok’ I can now just quickly install that from here. Pretty seamless.
Now if you want to go into how to set up App Lab games in a bit more detail then check out my ‘how
to install App Lab games’ video. I'll paste a link to it in the description down below.
If you'd rather set up SideQuest using your PC rather than your phone,
or you're having huge issues setting it up with your mobile phone,
then one of my most watched videos to-date is my easy step-by-step guide on getting
SideQuest set up using your PC. I'll put a link to that in the description down below as well.
It is so easy to sideload games from SideQuest onto your Quest headset now using this app on
your phone though. Just bear in mind though that the app is currently in beta form
and as such there could be issues when using it. It is great to see the developers
of SideQuest continually innovating and just making it easier and easier
for people to gain access to games outside of the main Oculus Store.
Thanks for watching! If you've enjoyed the video please don't forget to like and share it,
consider subscribing if you're not, and as always…
See you in the next one!