Apple has denied reports that developer interest in Vision Pro is currently very limited, following a report last month that the developer workshops for the headset were very poorly attended.
Developers working on Vision Pro apps themselves have mixed views on the likely appeal of the product, from those who feel that it will become a huge market, to those who consider it a riskier investment …
Developer interest in Vision Pro
Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman said in August that he was hearing that the in-person developer labs offered by Apple had empty seats.
Hearing so far that the Vision Pro developer labs (to test apps on actual hardware) have been under-filled with small amounts of developers.
One of the reported reasons for this was that US workshops were only available in Cupertino, meaning that developers on the East Coast, or elsewhere in the country, were faced with expensive and inconvenient travel.
Apple hasn’t commented on this, stating only that those who did attend the workshops were very satisfied with them. The comment was made in a very brief Digital Trends interview with Vision Pro marketing exec Steve Sinclair and Apple’s VP of developer relations Susan Prescott.
In the weeks after Apple unveiled the Vision Pro headset at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2023, there were reports that the device’s developer labs — where app creators could work directly with Apple to bring their ideas closer to a finished product — were sparsely attended, suggesting a collective shrug of the shoulders from the developer community.
Apple insists, however, that devs are even more excited for the product than the company expected. The company has seen “extremely high, three-digit customer satisfaction for the labs that we’ve run so far,” says Prescott, using a creative way to imply universally positive feedback.
Sinclair also said that the number of downloads of the Vision Pro software development kit (SDK) had “exceeded our expectations.”
Mixed expectations among Vision Pro developers
Even among developers who have committed to creating apps for the headset, levels of optimism appear very mixed.
Top comment by AppleDev
I haven't heard a single iOS developer that isn't ecstatic about the headset. There may be some that choose to wait until release since I don't think it will be an instant iPhone level success due to price and availability, but interest in it is definitely high. There is definitely the impression among developers that have used it that it is just a matter of time for this to be a big product. Adapting existing apps will generally be fairly easy, so for most developers we are talking a few weeks commitment to support it.
At the high end, one company that has been making mixed-reality games for several years believes that Vision Pro is going to play a huge role in popularizing the space.
Tommy Palm, CEO of Resolution Games: “I feel very convinced that Apple coming into this market segment is going to be monumental,” he explains, comparing the dawn of Vision Pro to the early stages of the computer era in the 1980s.
Ryan McLeod, game designer at Shapes & Stories, and developer of the Blackbox iOS game, sees it as more of a gamble.
McLeod, meanwhile, is slightly more hesitant given he runs a very small development studio, but that risk is “part of the fun” of operating at such a scale, he says.
He said that Apple had at least reduced the work involved, by allowing developers to use familiar tools.
“Designing and developing Blackbox for [augmented reality] is still a huge challenge, but being able to build it all in Swift and with iOS frameworks I’m already familiar with closed the intimidation gap enough for me to dive in.”
Apple last week launched visionOS beta 3 to developers, which can be used both by developers who have been lent a Vision Pro Developer Kit but also works within the Vision Pro Simulator.
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