As a wise man once shouted: “Developers, developers, developers”. A platform lives and dies based on the quality of its third-party software ecosystem. With that in mind, things are looking bleak for Vision Pro, the mixed reality headset launched by Apple, after it emerged this week that several of the biggest apps for iPhone, Mac and other Apple devices will be available. not be available for visionOS, at least initially.
YouTube, according to a report published Thursday by Bloomberg, will not create a native app for Vision Pro. The iPad app won’t work on the headset either. Instead, a spokesperson said, YouTube users will be encouraged to use the service through a browser.
Spotify also doesn’t currently plan to create a visionOS app, nor does it expect its iPad app to work on Apple’s headset. Here too the browser will be your friend… probably. “The music service will probably still run from a web browser,” Bloomberg reports, not so reassuringly. Of course, Apple would prefer everyone to use its own Apple Music streaming service, but Spotify remains a considerably more popular offering and that seems like a big gap. Spotify isn’t available as a default option for HomePod, but it’s a hugely successful app on iPhone, currently ranked number one in the music category.
The third big name that will be missing from Vision Pro’s library when it launches in early February is Netflix, in what Bloomberg described Wednesday as “a high-profile snub of new technology by the world’s largest video subscription service.” . Again, the existing iPad app won’t work and there won’t be a new native app for the visionOS platform either, so you’ll have to watch Netflix content through the browser, or not at all.
Apple generally maintains good relations with developers, despite their sometimes controversial treatment, and the iOS App Store is one of the great commercial successes of our time. However, not all of its platforms have proven popular with third-party software. Many big names, for example, have refused to create apps for the Apple Watch and Instagram still doesn’t have a native iPad app.
The lack of compelling third-party apps doesn’t appear to have significantly held back the Apple Watch, which gets by on its excellent health and fitness offerings. But the Apple Watch, in computing terms, is a peripheral, serving as a specialized backup to a more versatile device: the iPhone. On the other hand, Apple hopes that the Vision platform will eventually replace iOS as the central hub of users’ computing lives, and in this context, it is essential that developers get on board.
Maybe in time they will. But for now, some heavy hitters are choosing to sit back and see if Vision Pro is a success. And without these apps in its corner, the chances of success became a little lower.
