Apple's $3,500 headset launched with a serious app problem.
The big names stayed away, and plenty of people wrote the whole thing off as an overpriced paperweight.
But something strange is happening in the months since launch.
A wave of indie developers and smaller studios has quietly filled that void, and the apps they're building are doing things a flat screen simply cannot do.
Forget streaming reruns in a floating window.
Take the entertainment apps that have become the unofficial mascots of the platform.
One lets you stand courtside at an NBA game, craning your neck to follow the ball like you actually paid for floor seats.
Another drops you into a dinosaur enclosure where a T-rex the size of a two-story house stomps past your living room.
Users describe the experience as genuinely unnerving, in the best possible way.
Developers are pushing spatial computing apps that scatter your browser tabs, notes, and video calls across your physical space.
You can pin a reference document to the wall next to your desk, keep a timer hovering in your peripheral vision, and take a call as a life-sized hologram.
Whether that makes you faster or just dizzy depends on the person, but it's undeniably a new way to work.
The sleeper hit category, though, is the weird stuff.
Meditation apps that surround you with slow-moving auroras.
Music visualizers that turn your room into a reactive light show.
Games where you physically duck, lean, and reach for objects that aren't there.
One developer built a virtual pet that follows you around your house and gets moody if you ignore it.
So is any of it worth the price of admission?
The headset still costs more than a decent used car, and the killer app everyone keeps waiting for hasn't fully arrived.
But the gap between "expensive gimmick" and "genuinely useful tool" is narrowing fast, and it's the small developers, not the tech giants, doing the narrowing.
Early adopters who stuck with it say the turning point came when they stopped trying to replicate their phone and started exploring what only this device can do.
That shift in mindset, more than any single app, might be what determines whether spatial computing sticks or fizzles.
Our take: the Vision Pro still isn't for everyone, and the app lineup remains a work in progress.
But if you wrote off the entire platform based on its launch-day app desert, you're working with outdated information.
Final Thoughts
The most interesting software on this thing isn't coming from the companies you'd expect, and that's exactly why it's worth watching.