Posted by mfiguiere 4 days ago
Building an iPhone app? Pretty much required.
Building an iPad app? Almost free when you're building an iPhone app (depending on your tolerance for UI/UX)
Building a Watch app? It's a popular device but is it worth the investment? Most people say no.
Building for a brand new platform where we have to live with Apple's rules? No thanks.
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 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).
Regardless, thanks for the kind words! (and for those wondering, the link is https://heliographe.net :)
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.
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
Why develop for a platform that has almost zero users? Why buy an expensive device that has almost zero apps?
A this point in history Apple has the largest market cap and has not failed. Sure, it will fail eventually but it hasn't yet.