Why Apple’s Vision Pro is stuck in neutral

The Apple Vision Pro needs a killer app.

Did you know that Apple Vision Pro has been on sale for more than six months?

It’s OK. I forgot too.

That’s because the consensus that formed fairly quickly after the device got into the hands of regular people — not Apple-approved influencers and critics — seems to have held up: Very cool tech! Don’t really know what to do with it.

Maybe you could change that consensus with a killer app, or even some apps that aren’t totally killer but at least suggest practical reasons to plunk down a minimum of $3,500 for the headset.

Back in April, we noted that those apps didn’t seem to exist.

Now, Matthew Ball, an investor and analyst who’s taking stock of the device now that it’s been out for half a year, takes another look at the Apple Vision Pro app selection and finds … the same thing.

More worrisome: Developers have had their hands on this device for more than a year. There ought to be something wowing people by now, right? Ball writes:

For the Vision Pro to thrive, it needs apps. But six months after the device’s debut, new app releases have largely stopped, and the breakout app is nowhere to be found. To be fair, six months is not that long. However, there was an eight-month gap between Apple’s unveiling of the Vision Pro (and the simultaneous launch of its dev kit) and the public release of the device. As such, developers have had fourteen months to create and ship an application. Indeed, it’s likely that the length of this delay (the longest in Apple’s history), as well as Apple’s choice to reveal the device at its Worldwide Developers Conference, was specifically so that it might launch with more and higher quality apps.And yet even the many “Big” Media and Tech companies like Netflix, YouTube, Amazon, and Spotify have declined to ship an app on the Vision Pro. Of course, they have some competitive reasons not to support the Vision Pro, but it’s telling that they don’t feel any pressure to do so, and their absence makes it harder for customers to justify that $3,500 hit to their bank account.

Apple’s positioning around the Vision Pro (I’ve asked them for comment, but they have yet to respond to any of my queries about the device this year, so I’m not counting on one today) is that they are in this for the long haul. And they’re not going to worry about what the haters say. And where we’re going, we don’t need roads.

But at some point there’s the danger of a fully baked vicious cycle here: No awesome apps means people don’t buy the device, which means there isn’t a market that’s worth a developer’s time, which means there’s no incentive to make awesome apps. I’m not sure how they solve this one.