Apple's Vision Pro Developer Labs Not Drawing Many Attendees
Apple's Vision Pro Developer Labs Not Drawing Many Attendees
Apple in July began inviting developers to Vision Pro-focused developer labs in cities that include Cupertino, London, Munich, Shanghai, Singapore,...
shit’s too expensive.
As others have pointed out:
- It’s still pretty early. Many devs might not be very far along.
- There aren’t many locations. You have to travel to California, London, etc
Yeah, because California is famously a dev desert.
Or maybe it's because nobody sees any point in such an expensive gadget without a clear purpose or use case?
I feel like Apple caters to itself, both with its business practices and with its own forays into what they call innovation.
Who are you aiming at with this product right now in this economy?
- Young to Middle Aged
- Middle Wage to Wealthy Customers
( Those who are starting to go into adulthood trying to learn how to make ends meet or those that are the powerful minority of this difficult economic scale we all live on)
How do you expect developers to make reasonable margins on this when the product is prohibitively expensive? Let's be honest: it's almost $4k (starting at prices are not realistic).
Any developer going into this is basically a guinea pig
Apple is notorious for cannibalizing development ideas and making their own "iSteal Version" of the app.
Is it a cool product? Maybe? Do we NEED THIS NOW?
No, NOT AT ALL.
Does it sound like a shiny new carrot for its investors and shareholders? ABSOLUTELY.
Developers are still trying to figure out what this is, and they are not making that easy or appealing at the moment.
Building stuff now is just a foothold for the mass market version. But supporting Vision Pro doesn't mean that has to be your whole app. The vast majority of the code can be shared with phone/ipad/mac apps.
The problem is that getting developers to invest in the platform now is critical to make the mass market version viable. Nobody is going to rush to buy even a cheaper headset if all they can run is floating iPad apps.
Potential customers need to be sold on viable use cases for the headset, and those won't appear without a lot of developer support.
Not drawing many YET. Your app needs to be somewhat far along in development in order to need real world testing. Even Marco Arment, who makes a podcast app, has said his app is not ready yet.
Ah yes, podcasts. That thing famous for its popularity in VR/AR
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It’s a whole new OS in a new product category. You’re assuming what apps will be popular in visionOS, but since Apple is trying to make this a desktop computing platform, readers and podcast apps will be part of that platform.
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The podcast app isn’t the point when the issue is why developers aren’t signing up for early spots now and instead pushing appointments to later.
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I agree with you that "time in the oven" is wise and needed. I think putting a bit more effort into making it easier to develop would help. At the moment, it sounds like those development kits have their own challenges to entry for most devs. I also think the rate of purchase or adoption will definitely take some time.
It takes some time to become familiar with new APIs etc. But with a new product category such as AR/VR/spatial computing with so many new paradigms I would think that getting real hands on experience early is vital.
Otherwise developers end up wasting a lot of time creating concepts that ultimately don't work well in real world use. The visionOS simulator is no substitute for actually wearing a headset.
The fact that developers aren't grabbing every chance to get hands on with the hardware doesn't sound great to me. I suppose the main question is is that because Apple are not handling developer access well enough (I've seen a lot of complaints about the limited locations of the labs), or is it because developers are not interested in the platform.
I wonder if a lot of it is also just tech fatigue. It might just be me, but I'm more interested in getting better versions of things we already have explored thoroughly. Better software. Better repairability. Better longevity. When I saw the whole Vision Pro announcement my thoughts were... "Huh neat". And that's it. It takes a lot more than "huh neat" for me to even consider it at this point. And obviously the price point. I don't think I know a single person who thinks this is worth it. There is no way I could even come close to affording this especially at launch. None of this helps the tech fatigue. I mean hell I wish my microwave had less tech than it does, and I already select it based on how little touchscreen and weird buttons it has. And it's spreadding. The amount of touch based controls in cars scare the crap out of me. Think about how much this stuff distracts you. Or observe someone who's driving one of these things. Beep boop here, some notification there, and perfectly reasonable options for a normal car to have locked behind some kind of paywall... And now they're coming for my fridge. And my oven. I mean I could also just be getting older. There's that. And I'm not even in my 30s 😭
I completely agree with this. I've found myself drifting away from wanting cutting-edge, high-end stuff and towards more reliable tech. I've started taking notes on real paper instead of ipad, and I've been wearing my cheap Casio watch instead of my Apple Watch. I feel like in some ways I've hit a wall where my inner humanity longs for real, tangible things rather than more digitization.
Was eading up on the use cases for this, one of the big ones is mixed or augmented reality. But they don't give developers access to the cameras yet. There isn't really much you can do with it outsode of games like the Oculus but they aren't marketing it as such.
They're not giving direct access to the cameras, but developers don't need that raw data. Developers still have access to the data the cameras see. The choice to do this probably stems from a security perspective. This way there's no possible malicious app or site that can actually record you in an intimate environment like your home. It's the same way ARkit has worked for years on the iphones and ipads.
That's a very good point re: privacy. ARKit does work really well for scene detection like the room shapes, plane detection stuff etc but I was mostly thinking about the VisionKit stuff too (not the VisionOS ones) wheee you want to be smart about things. E.g. if you want to be able to detect text in mixed reality (like real time translation) or if you want to recognize objects not just by their shape.
It is going to be a privacy nightmare I agree but it is also severely limiting the possibilities of the software right now