Apple's $3,500 face-computer has been out for a while now, and the app situation is exactly what you'd expect from a product that mostly gets used alone in a dark room.
The Vision Pro app store is a fascinating graveyard of ambition, where a handful of genuinely cool experiences sit next to a mountain of glorified screenshots.
Spatial video playback is legitimately stunning, and apps that let you watch movies on a virtual IMAX screen actually deliver on the promise.
There are some genuinely clever productivity tools that pin multiple browser windows in your living room, assuming your neck can handle the ergonomics of staring at floating spreadsheets for eight hours.
A shocking number of "apps" are just iPhone ports stretched across a floating rectangle, which makes you wonder why you dropped four figures when your phone already does the same thing.
Half the games feel like tech demos from a 2016 startup pitch deck.
And yes, there's apparently a market for apps that simulate being in a nice apartment, because nothing says "I spent my rent on goggles" like virtually standing in a place you can't afford.
The real issue is the incentive structure.
They see a small user base, brutal development costs, and a platform where nobody's sure what actually works yet.
So you get a lot of experiments, a few premium showpieces, and a whole lot of silence from the big studios who probably ran the numbers and quietly noped out.
If you're a developer, a video nerd, or someone who genuinely loves early-adopter pain, sure.
For everyone else, the Vision Pro remains a very expensive answer to a question nobody asked.
The apps will get better, but "will get better" has been the tagline for every Apple platform since the Newton.
Our take: the killer app for Vision Pro is still the return policy.
Until developers figure out a reason to use this thing that doesn't involve lying on a couch pretending to be somewhere else, the app store will keep looking like a museum of good intentions.
Final Thoughts
Buy one if you've got money to burn and curiosity to match, but don't say nobody warned you.