Apple's $3,499 headset was supposed to launch a new era of spatial computing.
Six months in, the App Store tells a different story.
Independent developers are quietly walking away from visionOS.
In forums and Discord servers, the same complaint keeps surfacing: the install base is too small, the tooling is too fussy, and the money isn't there.
One developer who ported a popular meditation app told peers he made back less than his Apple Developer fee.
Apple has never published Vision Pro sales figures, but supply chain analysts estimate somewhere between 400,000 and 500,000 units sold since launch.
Compare that to the roughly 200 million iPhones Apple moves in a year, and the math for developers gets ugly fast.
A large chunk of the visionOS App Store is just iPad apps running in a floating window.
Apple counts these as "compatible" apps, which inflates the headline number while hiding how few are actually built for the headset's spatial features.
A handful of real visionOS apps hint at what could have been.
Spatial streaming apps that wrap you in a movie theater.
Medical imaging tools that let surgeons rotate a 3D scan with a pinch.
A few games that use hand tracking in genuinely novel ways.
YouTube didn't either, until a third-party developer made one and YouTube reportedly pushed back.
Spotify shows up as a stretched iPad app.
When the biggest names in streaming and music can't be bothered, smaller studios notice.
Apple's response has been characteristically tight-lipped, but the company keeps emphasizing enterprise use cases.
That's a quiet admission that the consumer app gold rush isn't happening.
Enterprises buy headsets for training and design reviews, not for the kind of app ecosystem that made the iPhone unstoppable.
There's a chicken-and-egg problem here that Apple hasn't cracked.
Apple tried to break the loop by subsidizing some developers and hosting visionOS labs, but subsidies don't scale, and the results have been mixed at best.
The first iPhone had a barren App Store for over a year before Apple opened it to outside developers.
But the Vision Pro isn't the first iPhone.
It's a premium accessory arriving in a mature market where developers already have proven platforms competing for their attention.
The most interesting visionOS apps right now aren't the flashy ones.
They're small utilities that solve specific spatial problems: a window manager that arranges your workspace in 3D, a tool that pins recipe steps above your stove, a note app that lets you scribble in midair.
These are the seeds of something, if anyone sticks around to water them.
The closing thought: Apple built a genuinely impressive piece of hardware and then assumed the software would follow.
Platforms live or die on developers, and right now the people who build things are voting with their time.
Final Thoughts
If Apple wants a real ecosystem, it needs to make visionOS worth the effort, not just worth the demo.