After finally releasing a Vision Pro version of my app last week, I've sold a total of 7 units. That's by far my worst software launch ever, even worse than my past failures.
Don't bother developing for this platform. The customer base is miniscule.
Don't bother developing for this platform. The customer base is miniscule.
I know that doesn't pay the bills, but I appreciate the hard work you do.
If it's good enough for me, it's probably already worth my time—though https://xkcd.com/1319/ comes to mind
Then maybe some subset of the population that is closer in interests to me would also find it useful, in which case the app might get more traction. That'd be nice, but not a necessary requirement for my definition of success
The big issue here is justifying spending thousands of dollars on the product. I'd go for it at $500 or so. Definitely not $2k or $5k.
Your advice makes sense in general but doesn’t apply to this specific case.
All I'm saying is "don't build an app for the masses if the market is small. build something that solves a real need that you have personally identified"
I released a version of my existing app because customers requested it. I had no independent interest in the platform.
> instead of solving a problem he identified would be best tackled with a Vision Pro than with a desktop app.
I can't think of any problems that would be best tackled with a Vision Pro than with a desktop app.
Then you also better hope Apple permits you to use the APIs you need to build it.
(Just a guy who has seen all proprietary APIs in this space being left in the dust when a standard arrived)
A good hockey player don't skate to where the puck is. He skates to where it will be.
But, a good hockey player doesn’t skate in the direction that absolutely nobody else is heading, somewhere that might even be outside the rink (in the sense that we haven’t really shown if a good UI for VR can actually be created, yet, so it might not even be a possible “part of the game,” so to speak).
That doesn't make sense in this context. Unless you consider Meta, Loft Dynamics, Valve, HTC, and dozens of other companies to be "absolutely nobody."
A better business model would probably be to pay people a couple hundred dollars to take their headsets. At least that might result in some install base.
I'm not a hockey player.
> He skates to where it will be.
The time scale for hockey players is seconds, not years.
This is such a useless cliché.
Most developers have very limited resources. Apple can afford to invest in pipe dreams (reportedly they spent $billions working on the now cancelled car project), but I certainly can't.
This is a fictitious number. Apple never had the manufacturing capacity to reach that so-called target.
> the reported shareholder near-revolts
Citation needed.
> On track to having sold less than 15% of their Y1 target (400,000 vs 3 MM)
All the reports online reflect actual vs. expected more around 450-500k vs. 800k - 1M, not 3 million.
> the reported shareholder near-revolts
The stock market's reaction to the Vision Pro announcement saw Apple's shares dip by 3%, indicating a mix of investor optimism and concern, not revolt.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/apple-vision-pro-soft...
Regarding stock, Apple almost always dips by a significant amount during an event. They’re very much traded as buying on the hype and selling on the news.
3MM was never possible, not sure where you got these numbers.
https://www.uploadvr.com/non-pro-apple-vision-headset-report...
Meta is having enough trouble attracting developers with hardware that's an order of magnitude cheaper and has two orders of magnitude more units in the wild. They got through the first hurdle of convincing people to try VR but keep falling at the second hurdle of user retention, headsets that are gathering dust in a closet don't make any money for developers.
Apples decision to go all-in on hand tracking compounds the software problem even further because the vast majority of VR software that has already been developed is designed around controllers with IMUs/buttons/sticks/triggers/haptics, and would be very difficult to port over to the Vision Pros much more limited control scheme.
They clearly haven’t executed it correctly yet. But at least they do have some hope of beating the bootstrapping problem that everybody else seems to have—they could try and get users first, and then I bet developers would quickly follow.
Developers have to manually check a box to enable running the iPad version of their app on visionOS so it’s entirely out of Apple’s hands. Not sure why they took this approach
> Your iPhone and iPad apps will be made available to users on Apple Vision Pro, unless you edit your apps’ availability in the App Store Connect
https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-yo...
And it makes sense for some devs to not provide their app on the platform if they use unsupported APIs or if their experience is otherwise degraded for some unknowable reason. Though the side effect is Netflix and YouTube can just withhold their apps that presumably otherwise work.
The main roadblock would be the OS support, and Meta's already has that. They are of course lacking another big roadblock, which is the store.
They just announced they're doing that: https://developers.meta.com/horizon/blog/building-2d-apps-on...
AFAICT there won't be Play Store support though, so devs will have to publish their 2D Android apps specifically to the Quest store.
I maintain an Android app which doesn't require Play Services. Might as well get it on the store if Meta is encouraging it
That said, visionOS can run iPad and iPhone apps unmodified. Meta will not bundle Google Play Services and a few other Android APIs, so APKs won’t be publishable on their store without some amount of work to use their alternate SDK.
it's just not officially supported, since they have been having a fight with google for years now. meta is claiming that google are the ones that don't want to see the play store on the platform.
The Apple headset thing is $5000 and much bigger than a pair of sunglasses. I just don’t think the tech is here yet to make something that most people actually want. So nobody has the problem that Apple can solve yet: good enough hardware in search of useful apps.
No VR device has even gotten close to having to answer a question like “how is this useful” because the current janky hardware is only appealing to those of us who are happy to just play games, haha.
That's how they want to kickstart the app ecosystem by not doing anything.
Any non-ported app with any non-trivial functionality is likely to break in both obvious and subtle ways especially around UX. Who's gonna support the app on the platform and deal with customer complaints? Apple? You? Or the dev who might not even have the device to debug it on?
That same rumor mill has always said that an affordable consumer version is the long term goal.
Apple has started development on a consumer version of the tech in a glasses form factor several times over the years, only to decide the current tech still doesn't allow for what they want.
For instance, an iteration that was tethered to an iPhone that made it to test production in 2019:
> Apple could begin production of its long-rumored augmented reality glasses as early as the end of this year, noted analyst Ming-Chi Kuo has said.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/3/8/18256256/apple-ar-glasses-...
Every step of development is a reason not to write software for this thing, and it doesn't exist in a vacuum, either.
I have trouble believing that even a successor to the Vision Pro would look significantly better than my $800 Pimax Crystal Light.
And yes I'm talking about most of the "native apps".