Businesses aren't as resentful as individual developers; IMO the difficulty is that it's really hard to make compelling content.

iPhone suits simple use cases, chat, video, audio, remote controls, utilities, simple games, and with controllers medium complexity games

iPad will do any phone or laptop app, plus high complexity games with a controller

Watch will do data displays, notifications, very small remote controls

Headset? AR, VR, cinema. But right now, that means "Occulus games, first party virtual display, and the kind of static AR content that's theoretically possible on an iPhone but very few actually use*", and AVP is 7 times the price of Meta's headset.

There's useful stuff if can do in specific niches, but I can't tell if e.g. "surgeons use AVP to assist during surgery" is a fluffy headline or a demonstration of value-add, and even if it's useful in this case it remains hard to figure out what this translates to in a mass consumer market.

https://9to5mac.com/2024/10/16/the-vision-pro-is-being-used-...

* some amazon listings let you see the product; IKEA used to have an app for that, then got rid of it, no idea if it came back

I’m an indie app developer building photography apps because I love photography.

I don’t harbor any particular resentment towards the App Store; in fact I am fine giving Apple 15% of my proceeds (I make way less than $1M a year) to handle content delivery, refund requests, minor advertisement, etc.

I bought a Vision Pro on release, and have a number of ideas/prototypes for it.

After a few weeks of hacking, there are two simple reasons why I didn’t pursue development of them any further:

- the APIs are still really early stage (eg nothing around windowing, I’d like to build some pro photo editing apps that’d require advanced windowing functionality)

- even if I were to work around the API shortcomings, take the time to develop a full app, and then release it - then how many sales will I get at most? Maybe a thousand? Compared to the iPhone/iPad/Mac, that’s nothing.

So I figured waiting a year or two for the APIs to get better and more people to have access to the hardware made sense.

Also, I went from considering making AVP exclusive apps to making apps that work on Mac/iPad, and maybe have some bonus features on the AVP - I think that’s a better way to go about it (nothing released like that yet, still in development).

All that said, there’s something magical about the AVP’s high quality screens for photography. Seeing your photos in space right in front of you is definitely one step above looking at them on a phone/tablet/laptop screen (and one step below looking at large high quality prints of them, but that requires a different kind of effort).

> resentment with the App Store

Not only, in general, over the last year or so, Apple has used every opportunity to antagonise and frustrate developers.

A business wouldn't care about the Vision Pro because there are but 10 people who still own one. The device is limited, extremely expensive and the software platform questionable at best - why did Apple needed to reinvent *Reality APIs instead of joining an existing industry is beyond me.

There are indie devs who still use the vision pro for engagement - flashy posts on the socials etc, but that's not enough to make a dent. Also, for many of them, this is their first encounter with AR/VR where Apple present's their achievements as novel while there are already existing ecosystems from other vendors.

The most popular apps on Vision Pro sold tens of copies. Not tens of thousands. Tens.

So, for a ~$5000 in hardware costs and unknown amount of dev time you get 10-50 dollars in return.

You don't need any feeling of resentment to run an easy ROI calculation

You don't think it has more to do with the tech having hyper-specific use cases and being too expensive for most consumers to just casually own? Don't get me wrong, I think it is wonderful tech, but people pushing for VR/AR to be a big thing are a very siloed, vocal minority that always seems to be baffled when the latest iteration of it goes nowhere. It's because none of it has been practical enough for common consumption, yet.

Vision Pro is not a mass market device the addressable market is very small for any big investment from developers. Until the sales reach in millions Apple will need to develop themselves or pay developers to build stuff for it

My uninformed guess is that aside from the obvious glaring user base size problem, the API is too locked down to build unique, interesting apps and too different/incompatible to port existing ones like VR games.

Not really. It's merely a chicken and egg problem.

Why develop for a platform that has almost zero users? Why buy an expensive device that has almost zero apps?

You just listed 4 of the top 10 companies in the world by market cap. Failing is an overstatement

Not sure where Google, Apple, or Facebook have "failed"... If we are taking a single random product's success/failure and projecting it on the whole company then Microsoft has failed more times than I can count, the most relevant to this discussion being the hololens and the biggest recent history blunder being the Microsoft Phone.