Apple spent years promising that the Vision Pro would reinvent how we live, work, and play.
The headset finally landed, and the hardware is undeniably futuristic—twin 4K displays, eye tracking that feels like a superpower, and a price tag that could cover a used Honda.
But peel back the sci-fi polish, and a nagging question emerges: where are all the apps?
Dig into the App Store's visionOS section and a pattern jumps out.
A huge chunk of what's available are barely warmed-over iPad apps running in a floating window.
Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify famously sat out the launch entirely, forcing early adopters to watch their favorite shows through a browser.
For a $3,500 device sold as the next computing platform, that's not a rounding error—that's the whole ballgame.
The apps that *are* native tell a more interesting story.
Spatial video players, 3D anatomy tools, and a handful of immersive games show genuine flashes of what's possible.
But they're scattered islands, not an ecosystem.
Developers I've spoken with describe a brutal calculus: a tiny install base, expensive dev kits, and a user base that expects magic.
Why pour months into a visionOS exclusive when the same effort on iPhone reaches a billion pockets?
Apple's answer has been to lean on the iPad compatibility crutch.
You can open Slack, scroll Reddit, and pretend you're being productive.
But it also quietly admits the platform isn't ready to stand on its own.
Every floating iPad window is a small confession that the killer app hasn't arrived yet.
Here's where the conspiracy-minded among us should perk up.
Apple has a long history of shipping underbaked first-gen hardware and letting the software catch up later.
The iPhone launched without an App Store.
The Apple Watch launched without third-party apps.
The playbook is familiar: get the hardware in the wild, build the install base, then unleash the developers once the audience is big enough to justify the investment.
Vision Pro demos lean heavily on watching movies and looking at photos—passive experiences that don't need a thriving app economy.
Meanwhile, the company keeps dropping hints about spatial computing as a "long-term" project.
Translation: don't judge the app library today.
For now, though, buyers face an uncomfortable truth.
You're not paying for the apps—you're paying to be an early beta tester for a platform that might, or might not, become the next big thing.
That's an expensive bet with no guaranteed payoff.
The real question isn't whether Vision Pro apps exist.
It's whether enough people will buy in to make developers care.
If they don't, the headset becomes a gorgeous, expensive paperweight—a monument to a future that never quite arrived. **Our take:** The Vision Pro's app problem isn't a bug, it's a feature of Apple's slow-burn strategy—and whether that's genius or hubris depends entirely on how many of us are willing to pay to find out.
Final Thoughts
Until the killer app shows up, this is a developer kit wearing a consumer price tag.