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.
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?
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.
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.