There are two popular applications that have had my goodwill, my attention and my subscriptions, that I’ve soured on in the last few months for different reasons.
Supernatural, a VR exercise app, launched in April of 2020. It was founded by Chris Milk, who has music industry connections from his time directing music videos, which meant he was positioned to license popular music set to BeatSaber-style workouts, with human coaches providing (offline) direction. The launch timing was fortuitous, with everyone looking for ways to workout at home during the pandemic. It’s one of the most successful VR subscription apps, with plenty of daily users who swear by it. Facebook aka Meta was so excited about it, they spent a year and a half purchasing the company, including a legal battle with the FTC. I bought my Quest 3 mostly for Supernatural.
Then in January, Meta announced “Supernatural will no longer receive new content or feature updates starting today.” For now, the old workouts are still available; it’s not known how long the licensing deals stay in place. So it’s a zombie app now.
Fans like myself have to decide: are we ok with the existing list of workouts and nothing new coming out? Are we cool giving $10 a month to Meta for this? Zuckerburg told us all to follow the VR dream with him, and even renamed his company around it. Now AI is the new hotness, and VR is being unsentimentally dumped by Meta. (What will their new name be? Clanker?)
For now I’m going to leave my Supernatural subscription in place so I can access the back-catalogue, but I feel like a sucker doing it. Consumer spending sends a message, and I hate sending Meta the message that what they did with Supernatural and their VR effort in general, is ok.
Then we have Duolingo, the language learning app. Duolingo has been around fifteen years or so. They have tons of gamification to keep users engaged. I have a 1035 day streak of doing at least one lesson every day, and a 473 day friend streak with my wife. Honestly though, the streaks are kind of a sham. You can get “streak freezes” in case you forget a day. And I’m pretty sure I was out of streak freezes at least once, and Duolingo gave me a pass, anyway. They’ve also done the opposite: told me I was going to lose my streak if I didn’t do a lesson, when I knew I had streak freezes left. The friend streaks are more effective: if you do your lesson and your friend hasn’t, you can “nudge” them to get it done. I’m not even sure you CAN lose a friend streak, but the peer pressure to do a lesson is real.
Anyway, in March, Duolingo extensively reorganized a bunch of their old Spanish lessons. As a side effect, the app no longer knows what I know and don’t know. It thinks I’ve completed lessons I haven’t, and so asks me questions about words or phrases I never learned. I tried to go back a few chapters to re-do them so I can get reoriented, but the app doesn’t have a way to say “this is where I am now, pretend I never did this chapter and remember I’m here now”. I spent a lot of time and effort getting to where I am in the content, and Duolingo seems to have just invalidated that progress without a second thought. Even though I know in my heart that five minutes a night isn’t going to make me a fluent Spanish speaker, that still feels bad. I’m going to stick with Duolingo for now, but my faith is a lot shakier now.
Christopher Brooks 07 April 2026