When Apple launched Vision Pro in early 2024, the assumption was straightforward: build the best spatial computing hardware, and developers will come. Apple’s track record with iPhone and iPad suggested that premium hardware with a healthy margin would attract a thriving app ecosystem. Eighteen months later, that hasn’t happened the way anyone expected.

The visionOS App Store remains surprisingly thin. There are good apps — spatial video playback, immersive workspace tools, a handful of genuinely impressive games. But the volume of new releases has slowed considerably since the initial launch burst. Several studios that announced visionOS projects in 2024 have quietly shelved them.

The Economics Don’t Work for Most Developers

The core issue isn’t technical. visionOS development tools are excellent, and SwiftUI translates well to spatial computing. The problem is market size.

With an estimated installed base still under 500,000 units globally, even a wildly successful Vision Pro app reaches a tiny audience. Compare that to the iPhone’s billion-plus active devices. A developer spending six months building a visionOS app is competing for the attention of a user base smaller than many individual cities.

The math is brutal. If 5% of Vision Pro owners discover your app and 10% of those convert at $9.99, you’re looking at maybe $25,000 in revenue — before Apple’s cut. That doesn’t cover a single developer’s salary for the six months of development time.

Enterprise applications change the equation somewhat. Companies are willing to pay $50-100 per seat for productivity tools, and they don’t need millions of users to justify the investment. But enterprise sales cycles are long, and most spatial computing enterprise apps are custom-built rather than purchased from an app store.

The Spatial Computing Learning Curve

There’s another problem that’s less discussed: building great spatial apps requires thinking differently about interaction design.

On a phone, you have a touchscreen and well-understood interaction patterns. On Vision Pro, you have eye tracking, hand tracking, voice, and a potentially infinite canvas. The design space is enormous but the patterns aren’t established yet. What makes a spatial spreadsheet better than a regular one? When should content float in space versus attach to surfaces? How do you handle notifications when someone is immersed in a task?

Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines for visionOS are thorough but can’t answer these questions definitively because nobody has enough real-world usage data yet. Developers are experimenting, which is healthy, but experimentation is expensive when your potential audience is small.

What Competitors Are Doing Differently

Meta’s approach with Quest has been the opposite — prioritize volume over margin. The Quest 3 and Quest 3S have sold millions of units, giving developers a meaningful market. The apps aren’t as polished as visionOS apps, but they make money because enough people own the hardware.

Meta has also been aggressive with developer incentives. Their developer fund, rev-share bonuses for top-performing apps, and featured placement programs give small studios a financial cushion while the market grows. Apple’s developer programs for Vision Pro have been comparatively modest.

Sony’s PSVR 2 took a third approach: attach to an existing ecosystem with proven demand for immersive content. PlayStation gamers are already primed for VR gaming, and Sony doesn’t need to convince them that spatial computing is the future. It just needs to ship good games.

Where Things Go From Here

Apple’s rumoured lower-cost headset — likely in the $1,500-2,000 range — would help with the market size problem but probably not enough. The real inflection point for spatial computing app development requires either:

1. A killer app that drives hardware sales. The iPhone had the App Store itself. The iPad had the web. Vision Pro hasn’t found its equivalent yet.
2. A price point under $1,000. Consumer technology adoption follows predictable curves, and spatial computing headsets need to cross the $999 threshold to reach early majority buyers.
3. Enterprise adoption at scale. If major corporations standardize on Vision Pro for specific workflows — design review, remote collaboration, training — the installed base could grow enough to sustain a developer ecosystem.

My money’s on option three happening first. Apple’s enterprise relationships are strong, and the Vision Pro’s display quality and processing power make it genuinely superior for professional use cases. But enterprise adoption is slow, and it won’t produce the kind of consumer app ecosystem Apple typically cultivates.

The Bigger Picture

Apple can afford to play the long game. They’ve done it before — the first iPad was criticized as a “big iPhone” with no clear use case, and it took several years and hardware generations for the tablet category to find its footing.

But the developer community isn’t as patient as Apple’s balance sheet. Studios need revenue now, and many are redirecting resources to platforms where they can reach customers today. If Apple wants visionOS to thrive, they need to either subsidize developers more aggressively or find a way to get headsets into more hands faster.

The technology in Vision Pro is remarkable. I’ve used it extensively, and nothing else comes close for display quality, passthrough fidelity, or interaction polish. But great technology without a thriving ecosystem is a tech demo, not a platform. Apple’s got maybe another 12-18 months to solve this before developers permanently move on to where the users actually are.