Apple is making a major push to attract developers to create apps for its Vision Pro mixed reality headset, which goes on sale in Europe and Australia today. Software for the new device is appearing much more slowly than apps for the iPhone and iPad at the time of their release, notes Financial Times.
Image source: apple.com
The App Store launched in July 2008, and by the end of that year it had about 10,000 iPhone apps. The first iPad went on sale in April 2010, and by mid-year there were more than 20,000 apps for the tablet in the store. Apple’s Vision Pro went on sale on February 2, but there are currently “more than 2,000” apps available for the headset. That’s natural, because developers are more likely to invest time and money in platforms that have billions of users than tens or hundreds of thousands, Omdia analyst George Jijiashvili noted.
The $3,500 price tag on the Apple Vision Pro is a powerful deterrent to the device’s popularity. Apple will sell 350,000 units of the Vision Pro this year, Omdia predicts, 750,000 in 2025, and 1.7 million in 2026. For comparison, the company sold 20 million iPads in the first year. Apple shipped 100,000 units of the Vision Pro in Q1, according to IDC statistics — less than half of what Meta sold.✴ with its Quest. In monetary terms, Apple has managed to capture more than 50% of the VR headset market due to the high price of its device, but the actual success of the product will depend, of course, on the content available. And the number of new apps for the Vision Pro has dropped sharply compared to January and February, according to Appfigures. Nearly 300 leading iPhone developers, whose apps are downloaded tens of millions of times, including Google, Meta✴Tencent, Amazon and Netflix have yet to release apps or services for the Vision Pro.
Those who have started releasing apps have different considerations. Some are betting that consumers who can afford an expensive headset are more likely to spend money on apps for it. Others are playing the long game: if they can get a foothold on Apple’s latest platform early, they can expect to make money in the coming years. Big-name content creators praise the Vision Pro but lament its small audience: For the economics of content production to work, “we need this device in a lot of homes.” They are counting on a low-cost version of the headset, expected in the next year or two.
And, of course, compatibility remains an important issue. For example, developing the $30 Things project management app for the Vision Pro has already paid off because Apple has released tools that make it easier to adapt apps originally written for the iPhone and iPad. But the creators of the VR music game Synth Riders, which is listed in the Apple Arcade catalog, had to put in more effort: after the PlayStation VR and Quest versions, they had to add hand tracking because the Vision Pro does not have controllers included.
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