Six months after Apple strapped a computer to America's face, the app situation on Vision Pro is… a thing.
The headset launched with a handful of native experiences and a promise that developers would flood in.
Instead, the flood looks more like a guy with a garden hose checking the mail.
The big selling point was "spatial computing," which is tech-speak for "you can put a floating screen wherever you want." In practice, that means people are buying a $3,500 device to do the exact same work they did on a $400 laptop, except now their neck hurts and they can't see when the mail carrier arrives.
The native apps that did show up are a mixed bag.
There's a meditation app that turns your living room into a tranquil forest, which is genuinely cool for about eleven minutes until you remember you paid rent-level money for it.
There's a dinosaur experience that's impressive the first time and then sits in your library like an unused gym membership.
And there's a productivity app that lets you arrange floating windows, because apparently we solved all human problems and this was next.
The real comedy is the "compatible" apps.
That's the polite term for iPad apps running in a sad rectangle inside the headset.
Developers didn't build anything new; they just let Apple stretch the same app across a virtual wall.
You paid a premium for a sci-fi future and got a Zoom call in a snow globe.
Streaming is where things get genuinely weird.
Some services built custom immersive content, which is great if you enjoy watching a basketball game from a courtside seat that doesn't actually exist.
Others just dropped a floating TV screen in front of you, which is technically a feature and emotionally a screensaver.
Then there's the price of entry for developers.
Building for Vision Pro means learning a whole new toolkit, and the install base is roughly the population of a mid-sized town.
Investors want growth, and "the 40,000 people who bought a face computer" is not a growth chart that excites anyone.
So the apps trickle in, optimized for a user base that mostly consists of tech reviewers and people who want you to know they own one.
To be fair, the hardware is legitimately impressive.
The eye tracking works, the passthrough is sharp, and the whole thing feels like the future.
It's just a future with a shockingly thin app store, like a brand-new mall where only three stores opened and one of them sells candles.
Apple's playbook has always been to launch rough and let the ecosystem catch up.
The iPhone had no App Store at all for its first year.
The Apple Watch was a mess before it became genuinely useful.
So maybe in three years we'll all be doing spatial spreadsheets and wondering how we lived without them.
Or maybe the Vision Pro becomes the Newton of our generation—beloved by a tiny cult, remembered fondly, and eventually absorbed into a pair of glasses nobody thinks twice about.
For now, if you're considering dropping the cash, ask yourself one question: do you have a specific reason to own this, or do you just want strangers to ask you about it?
Honestly, the Vision Pro apps situation is a chicken-and-egg problem that Apple created and now has to solve.
The hardware is ready; the software isn't, and no amount of floating windows will fix that until developers see a reason to show up.
Final Thoughts
Until then, it's a very expensive conversation piece.