Apple spent years promising that its $3,499 headset would usher in a new era of spatial computing.
But if you actually strap one on and start browsing the App Store, a different story emerges.
The library that was supposed to justify that price tag looks thinner than a Silicon Valley apology.
When the Vision Pro launched in February 2024, Apple bragged about 600 apps "purpose-built" for visionOS.
That sounds impressive until you realize the iPhone App Store had thousands of native apps within months of its 2008 debut.
More telling: Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify — three of the most-downloaded apps on Earth — never bothered to build native versions.
They just let their iPad apps run in a compatibility mode, untouched and unloved.
The result is a headset that can feel like a very expensive way to look at blown-up iPad icons floating in your living room.
That's not the future Apple's keynote promised.
It's a workaround dressed up as innovation.
Dig into the developer forums and a pattern surfaces.
Building for visionOS is expensive, the user base is small, and the return on investment is murky at best.
Why spend months crafting a spatial experience for a few hundred thousand users when you can optimize for the billion-plus iPhones already in pockets?
That's not laziness — it's rational economics.
And it quietly undermines the entire premise of the platform.
Its marquee spatial apps — immersive sports, 3D movies, that dinosaur demo — are dazzling for about twenty minutes.
Then you're back to the home screen, scrolling past a handful of genuinely native titles and a sea of stretched-out ports.
The ecosystem is being carried by novelty, not utility.
A few developers have built genuinely clever spatial tools — 3D design apps, immersive meditation, and some wild interactive storytelling experiments.
These prove the hardware can do remarkable things.
But they're the exception, not the rule, and they're not enough to convince a skeptical mainstream buyer to drop four figures.
The deeper issue is that Apple hasn't given developers a killer reason to show up.
The Apple Watch had fitness and notifications.
Watching movies alone on a virtual screen?
Until there's a must-have spatial app that doesn't exist anywhere else, the headset remains a developer curiosity with a luxury price tag.
The closing thought here is simple: Apple built a beautiful stage and forgot to book the performers.
Until the apps arrive in force, the Vision Pro is less a revolution and more a very polished preview of something that might happen later.
Final Thoughts
And "might happen later" has never been a great selling point for a $3,499 gadget.