TL; DR
Full story
In the two years we’ve been writing about the metaverse, this is the first time the concept seems both viable And desirable.
Why?
Because ever since the Apple Vision Pro came out, our YouTube feeds have been flooded with content surrounding Vision Pro and its alternatives, like the Quest 3, Big screen furtherAnd Dipped visor.
But this is our concern:
What if we’re stuck in an algorithmically gated echo chamber? (Because Naturally we’re fed VR content – we’ve been following it for years!)
In an effort to calm those fears, we’re going to dive into some of the numbers surrounding the Vision Pro and see:
-
How many units have been shipped
-
How much Vision Pro original apps are available
-
How many of those apps are actually used
(Because if Apple wins here, the rest of the industry can piggyback).
Okay, so answers 1 and 2: Estimated to have sold over 200,00 units, the headset launched with 600 native Vision Pro apps (along with over 1 million iPad app ports).
We’re looking at native apps because they take advantage of the Vision Pro’s ‘spatial computing’ capabilities (which is a basic hardware requirement for the metaverse, aka ‘the 3D virtual internet’).
Now the burning question: how many of those apps are there? Actually being used?
First a pallet cleaning…
Remember, hundreds/thousands of downloads per day aren’t much for an app on the iPhone (which has over 1 billion users), but on Vision Pro’s 200,000 installs, they’re damn industry leading.
Here are some notable stats that made us shine The compelling thread:
-
JigSpace (view/deconstruct 3D objects) saw 14,000 installs in week 1!
-
News Ticker (a paid news app) receives over 300 downloads per day
-
Juno (a native YouTube player from Vision Pro) broke into the (overall) top 10 in the Photo and Video category shortly after the device’s launch.
The takeaway:
Those numbers are impressive (relative to the total number of Vision Pros out there)! The apps themselves? Not so much.
That “killer app” for the Vision Pro – the one that’s going to convince regular people to spend $3,500 for a headset? It has yet to be discovered.
Patience is a virtue 
