Apple sold the Vision Pro as the future of computing.
Eighteen months later, the most honest thing you can say about its app store is that it looks like a mall food court after closing time.
A handful of glowing counters, a lot of dark space, and a growing sense that everyone who promised to show up quietly went home.
The numbers tell a story Apple would rather you not read.
Independent trackers have counted only a few thousand apps built specifically for visionOS, compared with the millions available on iPhone.
When the biggest names in entertainment decide your platform isn't worth a weekend of engineering time, that's not a launch problem.
What's left is a strange museum of demos.
A handful of gorgeous, expensive experiments that impress for ten minutes and then sit untouched.
A meditation app that floats a calm orb in your living room.
They're impressive the way a fireworks show is impressive — dazzling, expensive, and gone by morning.
Meanwhile, the apps people actually live in never made the trip.
You can mirror your Mac screen, which is a fancy way of admitting the device works best as a very heavy external monitor.
For $3,500, you're mostly paying for the privilege of doing what you already did on a laptop, except now with a battery strapped to your head.
The developers who did show up are starting to talk.
Several have said the audience is too small to justify the work.
Others discovered that spatial computing means rebuilding everything from scratch — new gestures, new interfaces, new rules — for a customer base you could fit in a mid-size arena.
Apple can subsidize a platform for years.
It cannot force developers to lose money on purpose.
This is the pattern that should worry anyone who cares about where tech is headed.
We keep getting sold the next platform before the last one has proven it deserves to exist.
Google Glass, the metaverse, 3D TVs, the smart refrigerator that orders your groceries.
Each arrived with a keynote and a promise, and each quietly became a garage-sale item.
The Vision Pro may be the most beautiful entry in that graveyard yet.
Not the money, though $3,500 is real money for most American families.
Every overhyped gadget that fizzles makes ordinary people a little more cynical about the next genuinely good idea.
Wearables that could help someone with a disability.
AR tools that could train a surgeon or a mechanic.
They'll have to fight through the wreckage of a headset nobody asked for.
The hard truth is that a platform lives or dies on its apps, not its hardware.
Apple built a stunning machine and then waited for the world to fill it in.
Final Thoughts
Until the company answers why a normal person should strap this to their face on a Tuesday night, the app store will keep looking like that empty food court — and the future will keep getting pushed to next year.