According to consultancy AppFigures, the quantity of new Vision Pro apps has steadily decreased each month since the device’s launch. A significant portion of the latest apps and concepts for the Vision Pro are being developed by independent creators, who tinker with projects on weekends alongside their full-time jobs. Apple reported in August that the Vision Pro boasted 2,500 apps, though AppFigures estimates that fewer than 1,900 are currently active.
When Apple revealed the Vision Pro in 2023, it called the $3,500 headset its next “major platform.” Two years later, and a year after going on sale, the device is thin on apps… According to consultancy AppFigures, which tracks Apple’s platforms, the number of new Vision Pro apps has declined every month since the device hit the market in February 2024.
Apple updated its most recent Vision Pro app count in August, with CEO Tim Cook telling investors on an earnings call that the platform had 2,500 apps. That number covers fully immersive apps that overlay virtual objects over the real world as well as 2D apps with some spatial components. By AppFigures’ count, less than 1,900 of these apps remained active at the end of January.
There are also about 1.5 million Vision Pro apps that are ported versions of iPhone and iPad apps. Apple automatically ports iPhone and iPad apps to the Vision Pro when they’re uploaded, but companies can decline. Those apps can be used inside the headset but appear as 2D flat screens…
Apple doesn’t publish Vision Pro sales, but one estimate from IDC suggests fewer than 1 million devices have been sold.
MacDailyNews Take: When even developers aren’t using the devkit, a platform has issues.
As we wrote back in March 2024:
There are a lot of people inside and outside of Apple who think the company should have waited on the Vision Pro, but it’s fairly easy today to see why Tim Cook released this beta (alpha?) devkit: He likely knew last year, or had a strong inkling, that Project Titan [“Apple Car”] was a goner and there wasn’t much excitement in Apple’s pipeline. He’d need something to point to as “innovation” while he continued on his seemingly unending quest to iterate and monetize products invented by Steve Jobs’ Apple (a very different place) while continuing Apple’s retail store buildout. He also needed something to energize developers and, who knows, they might come up with a killer visionOS app while Apple toils on the long road to real lightweight spatial computing glasses and beyond.
More importantly, Apple last year had already come to the sad realization that they’d missed the generative artificial intelligence revolution and would need a distraction while they feverishly scrambled to catch up…
You have to feel for Cook. After a decade plus of being able to iterate and monetize Jobs’ inspired products and services and continue adding retail stores around the world to spectacular effect, and being lauded for it, he now finds himself in a place that requires actual vision to be able to see which path to take. And he’s not the guy. Even the guy who put him in the position knew it.
Tim’s not a product person, per se. – Steve Jobs
See also:
• Contrary to popular belief, Steve Jobs knew about Apple Watch – February 13, 2023
• Work on Apple Vision Pro began under Steve Jobs – August 23, 2023Beyond the fact that Cook can’t even execute a compelling live keynote address, his big send off, the “Apple Car,” [the idea of which was also germinated under Jobs] fizzled in ignominious failure.
See also:
• Scrapped Apple Car ‘a massive disappointment that will alter the course of the company’s history, perhaps for decades to come’ – Gurman – March 11, 2024
• Apple employees referred to doomed Apple Car project as ‘The Titanic Disaster’ – February 29, 2024So, despite myriad misgivings and protestations inside Apple, Cook pulled the trigger early on the Vision Pro. He had to have something to point to that would buy him some time. Even Apple’s rubber-stamping board of lackeys would wake up and start asking questions otherwise.
While Cook is hemming and hawing when faced with shareholders (virtually, of course, never again in person for as long as Cook remains), Apple is currently in scramble mode trying to catch up to rivals — including the world’s most valuable company, Microsoft — in generative AI, a technology the company seems to have completely missed while focusing instead on the not-ready-for-primetime Apple Vision Pro, visionOS, its now-canceled decade-long multi-billion-dollar electric vehicle boondoggle, replacing leather in iPhone cases and Apple Watch bands with overpriced junk in a quest to “save the planet,” forcing employees to endure a constant barrage of time-wasting zero-productivity DEI sessions, and myriad other various and sundry “initiatives” which Cook deems of import. – MacDailyNews, February 28, 2024
When you lose your visionary CEO and replace him with a caretaker CEO, this is the type of aimless, late, bureaucratic dithering that ensues. – MacDailyNews, November 21, 2017
Until it gets another visionary leader (fingers crossed; Apple’s history has shown – cough, Sculley, Spindler, cough – that the next CEO could be far, far worse than the very competent caretaker Cook), Apple can afford to miss things like generative AI – which they clearly did – and then use its huge war chest to catch up – which they’re doing right now (fun times and 80-hour weeks inside Apple Park!) – and, hopefully, surpass rivals (or at least be as good). Apple will very likely unveil their catch-up work within months (this June at WWDC 2024) in iPhones (and iPads, Apple Watches, etc.) with built-in on-device generative AI and other new AI-driven features. – MacDailyNews, February 14, 2024
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The killer Vision app is concerts, sporting events, and travel guides/pilgrimages.
Give away the headset and charge prices equal to the live event tickets. $200 for a concert but you can choose any of 10 “seats” and rotate around. Same for sports. Trips would be guided, like you get in a five star real life trip. This is Rome, this is Mt. Everest, this is Tibet, this is the Amazon.
Either no one has the balls or Apple refuses to sign the checks (for the teams, the artists).
the Vision Pro is not at all a “distraction” for the cancelled car project. that’s horseshit.
it’s a chicken-egg situation, not a vanity project.
it has to start somewhere, and this is where it starts. A prototype type device that also happens to be for sale to early adapters and tech enthusiasts (like me).
as it evolves over subsequent iterations, more content will come, hardware improvements will be made, until it eventually emerges as a mass market product that makes sense for major developers to support, and regular people to buy.
This is just very much a forward-looking version 1 device of a whole new paradigm with some challenges like price and weight that will work themselves out in time.
So, in other, much more concise words, Vision Pro is a “beta (alpha?) devkit,” precisely as MacDailyNews wrote.
you missed the point, almost on purpose, since virtually all of MDN’s text is a critique of Tim Cook.
MDN wrote that the AVP is Tim Cook’s distraction from the failed car project, and a vanity project in the wake of Steve Jobs’ successes.
none of that is true and misses the point of the AVP, and the point of how all innovation evolves. You could’ve said the same thing about the iPhone, the Mac, the Watch, and other apple products when they too started out (and many people did).
The AVP is a revolutionary product, but this is what a revolutionary product looks like before it evolves into something more versatile and affordable.
I appreciate you critique. While I don’t own one, I appreciate the tech…I haven’t given up on this yet. I will say your last sentence is far from true…at least Apple’s “revolutionary products”.
The iPod, iPad, iPhone all had “starter pains,” but the market embrace of ALL was nothing like the AVP. This may have to do with the presence of a like product already on the market…so easier for consumers to appreciate the quality distinction of the Apple product? Regardless, the public adopted Apple’s devices with clarity/confidence.
The AVP isn’t the sole player in the realm, and it appears the tech is better, but the adoption has been wanting. Simply a significantly premature release (not typically an AAPL prob)? Does the public really need/want a device promoting isolation? Or an able device that costs a lot for almost immediate irritability?
Someone here likened its comfort to a “battle helmet.” This is a stout indicator of AAPL’s demise in releasing a product prior to readiness. This isn’t a matter of uncertainty & risk…no one knows absolutely how a product will be received, but, except for sadists, discomfort is experienced and rejected categorically in short order. This would have been shouting in the design lab.
I question if the AVP was a surrogate for the Apple Car? If so–curious at least and in real time, failed here too.
The Apple vision pro is overpriced, for the type of consumer product it is. That is why the soft sales and soft integration. They should have come in just under $1,000; and even that is still a little much, but at least more attainable.
As for “you have to feel for tim cook..” actually not at all. He is unfocused, and lacks aggressive creativity to advance Apple at a faster pace. Apple has been underperforming their true potential for about 8-10 years now. While Tim focuses way too much time on social issues, Steve was razor focused on innovation, quality, efficiency and advancing the ball.
While I think Tim a great guy, he lacks aggression fast pace for innovation, and has more losses, than gains, in the decision department. Apple needs a more focused, more aggressive CEO.
AAPL SHOULD have already been over $300, and more on a $400 trajectory. Reasons it is stalled – Lack of innovation, regression on OS/App/Software updates, missed way too many sale opportunities with lack of available inventory during numerous holiday quarters, dilution of product (announce in one quarter, release in next quarter, show financials in another quarter) – this alone was never done by Steve. Announce, release, sales reports – all in ONE quarter; and the benefit of that is TONS of main stream press for free.
Vision Pro released too early. It gave too many great ideas to competitors. VR augmented goggles are a dead end bout are a necessary transition. Glasses. It’s all about who makes a decent pair of augmented glasses first. To the extent AVP helps build out the infrastructure to get glasses working, that’s all that counts. Everything else is a distraction, everything other than making a final set of glasses that people can wear 24 seven, that effectively become an iPhone assistant on your face while you view reality, and have that reality augmented, all of it is the distraction.
But I think people are missing the point. The Apple Vision Pro is by far the best thing out there, and the closest thing that we would want on our faces as an augmented pair of glasses. Apple has to keep pushing and investing in this. It is the future. If someone else makes glasses before Apple does, Apple is finished. People will eventually get rid of their phones and have glasses as they will be far more integrated in personal than a phone.
All that said, Apple needs to get out a pair of glasses as soon as humanly possible. This is a race. This is Apple‘s biggest race ever.