Apple seeks ‘killer app’ for its $3,500 Vision Pro headset

Apple is struggling to attract fresh content for its innovative Vision Pro headset, with just a fraction of the apps available when compared with the number developers created for the iPhone and iPad in their first few months.

The lack of a “killer app” to encourage customers to pay upwards of $3,500 for an unproven new product is seen as a problem for Apple, as the Vision Pro goes on sale in Europe on Friday.

Apple said recently that there were “more than 2,000” apps available for its “spatial computing” device, five months after it debuted in the US.

That compares with more than 20,000 iPad apps that had been created by mid-2010, a few months after the tablet first went on sale, and around 10,000 iPhone apps by the end of 2008, the year the App Store launched.

“The overall trajectory of the Vision Pro’s launch in February this year has been a lot slower than many hoped for,” said George Jijiashvili, analyst at market tracker Omdia.

“The reality is that most developers’ time and money will be dedicated to platforms with billions of users, rather than tens or hundreds of thousands.”

Apple believes the device will transform how millions work and play. The headset shifts between virtual reality, in which the wearer is immersed in a digital world, and a version of “augmented reality”, which overlays images upon the real surroundings.

Omdia predicts that Apple will sell 350,000 Vision Pros this year. It forecasts an increase to 750,000 next year and 1.7mn in 2026 but the figures are far lower than the iPad, which sold almost 20mn units in its first year.

Estimates from IDC, a tech market researcher, suggest Apple shipped fewer than 100,000 units of Vision Pro in the first quarter, less than half what rival Meta sold of its Quest headsets.

Because of the device’s high price, Apple captured more than 50 per cent of the total VR headset market by dollar value, IDC found, but analyst Francisco Jeronimo added: “The Vision Pro’s success, regardless of its price, will ultimately depend on the content available.”

Early data suggests that new content is arriving slowly. According to Appfigures, which tracks App Store listings, the number of new apps launched for the Vision Pro has fallen dramatically since January and February.

Nearly 300 of the top iPhone developers, whose apps are downloaded more than 10mn times a year — including Google, Meta, Tencent, Amazon and Netflix — are yet to bring any of their software or services to Apple’s latest device.

Steve Lee, chief executive of AmazeVR, which offers immersive concert experiences, said that the recent launch of the device in China and elsewhere in Asia resulted in an uptick in downloads of his app. “However, it was about one-third of the initial launch in the United States.”

Lee remains confident that Vision Pro will eventually become a mainstream consumer product.

Wamsi Mohan, equity analyst at Bank of America, said the Vision Pro had “just not quite hit the imagination of the consumer”.

“This is one of the slower starts for a new Apple product category, just given the price point,” he said. “It seems management is emphasising the success in enterprise a lot more.” 

Nonetheless, some app developers are taking a leap of faith and launching on the Vision Pro. Some are betting that customers who can afford the pricey headset will be more likely to splurge on software too.

Others are playing a longer game, hoping that establishing an early position on Apple’s newest platform will bring returns in the years to come.

Anthony Geffen, chief executive and creative director of Atlantic Productions, which won the first ever Bafta award for virtual-reality storytelling, said he believed the Vision Pro represented a “tipping point” for headsets.

“I’ve been through all the false dawns” of VR, he said. “I think in the next two to three years we will genuinely have devices that will be mass market. The Vision Pro has arrived at a very important time.”

Atlantic Productions is working with Apple to produce immersive videos, including vertiginous feats of climbing and “parkour” urban athletics, using bespoke 3D cameras developed by the Silicon Valley company to create ultra-high-resolution content.

“This is the most exciting platform I’ve ever worked with,” Geffen said. “I think it’s bigger than the smartphone.”

But he added that, for the economics of content production to work, “we need this device to be in a lot of homes”. That will only happen when Apple brings out a cheaper version, which analysts predict could arrive in the next year or two.

“Even if it is a small market right now, it’s going to be big I think,” said Tim Davison, developer of CellWalk, an immersive biology education app for Apple’s headset. “Vision Pro right now is an amazing glimpse of the future.”

Davison came away from last month’s Apple worldwide developers conference — where it announced the first update to the device’s operating system, visionOS 2 — more optimistic about the Vision Pro’s future.

“It’s the enthusiasm and tenacity, one year in, from the [Apple] engineers up to the execs, that makes me confident that I can invest in this platform,” he said.

Werner Jainek, chief executive of Cultured Code, raced to ensure its project management app Things was available when the Vision Pro first hit the market.

“It’s been our experience that it’s very good in the long term to be on Apple platforms from day one,” he said. Apple customers have proven themselves willing to pay for a “premium product” like Things, which costs $30 on Vision Pro, he said. “People are certainly willing on this new platform to spend money on productivity software.”

The Vision Pro version of Things had already broken even, Jainek said, because Apple’s developer tools made it easy to adapt its existing iPhone and iPad apps.

But for developers of immersive apps for other VR headsets, such as Meta’s Quest, porting that software to Vision Pro can mean having to start over from scratch.

“It was an adjustment,” said Arturo Perez, chief executive of Kluge Interactive. Its music based VR game Synth Riders is featured on the Apple Arcade games subscription service.

Changes from the PlayStation VR and Quest versions included having to add hand tracking, as the Vision Pro lacks the motion-sensitive controllers that other VR headsets use for input. “That was a big challenge,” Perez said.

Perez said he expected the “real pay-off to come later”. The Vision Pro is less like VR’s iPhone moment and more like the early PC era in the 1980s, he said.

“Apple can play the long game,” Perez added. “They are committed.”