Something strange is happening in Apple's spatial computing world, and early adopters are NOT happy about it.
A growing number of Vision Pro apps are vanishing from the App Store — or simply being abandoned by the developers who built them.
Just months after Apple's $3,500 headset promised to reinvent how we work, watch, and play, the app library is looking thinner than a launch-day crowd at a mall kiosk.
According to app-tracking data, a striking share of the headset's buzziest launch titles haven't been updated in months.
Some have quietly pulled their listings entirely.
Others still exist but feel like ghost towns — no new features, no bug fixes, no signs of life.
Take the streaming and productivity apps that Apple paraded on stage during the Vision Pro reveal.
Several of those flashy partners have since gone silent.
One high-profile video app reportedly stalled development after its team realized users weren't sticking around long enough to justify the cost of building for a tiny install base.
And that's the CORE problem: the install base.
Apple has never released official sales figures, but analysts estimate the headset sold somewhere in the hundreds of thousands — a rounding error compared to the iPhone's billions.
Why pour months of engineering into an app that maybe 50,000 people will ever open?
On Reddit and X, Vision Pro owners are trading lists of apps that have gone dark. "I bought this thing for the ecosystem," one user fumed. "Turns out the ecosystem was a launch-day demo." Another wrote that their favorite spatial app simply stopped working after an iOS update, with no word from the developer.
Apple, for its part, keeps pushing forward.
The company has been touting new immersive content, enterprise partnerships, and a steady drumbeat of software updates.
But critics say Cupertino is fighting an uphill battle: a premium price, a niche use case, and a developer community that's learned the hard way that being early to a new platform can mean getting burned.
The Vision Pro is a genuinely impressive piece of hardware.
The eye-tracking feels like science fiction.
But hardware without software is just a very expensive paperweight — and right now, the software side is wobbling.
Either Apple throws serious money and attention at luring developers back, or the headset becomes a cautionary tale about ambition outpacing adoption.
For the folks who dropped four figures on day one, that's a gamble they're already losing sleep over.
Our take: this is a classic chicken-and-egg problem, and Apple hasn't cracked it yet.
Until there's a killer app that makes the headset feel essential, expect more developers to walk away.
Final Thoughts
If you're thinking about buying in, wait — the app store you see today might not be the one you get tomorrow.