With over 1.5 million compatible apps and 1,000 spatial apps, Apple Vision Pro is having an impressive launch — yet one problem keeps ruining the party.
When Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, took to X to share this achievement, some commenters pointed out that the huge amount of apps doesn’t mean much to them when discoverability is a major problem. “Joz - can we get the App Store to actually show all these apps so they're easier to find?” said one commenter, a sentiment echoed by many below Joswiak’s post.
Another comment was less kind with their critique, saying “Your Vision Pro App Store discovery sucks bro, fix it”.
The problem arises from Apple Vision Pro App Store’s smaller curated list of apps which lacks the broad categories that you’ll find on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Where you can browse for ‘games’ or ‘productivity’ and more on Apple’s other app stores, the Vision Pro’s store features one big list — and searching through it is, according to users, a pain.
Instead of browsing through their chosen category, users have to find the app they want through the internet, and then search for it directly in the App Store. This means unknown developers or smaller projects have less chance of being picked up by users at launch as they are only looking for exactly the apps they want, rather than discovering new ones through the categories.
Given Apple Vision Pro commands a high price, and is the first headset of its kind, this might further disincentivize developers from continuing to port their projects to the headset. Not only is there a learning curve in creating apps due to it being an advanced spatial computer but developers risk no one seeing their projects after all that work.
Developers react
The lack of discoverability for new apps on the Apple Vision Pro’s App Store (no top charts) makes developing apps for it not very enticing. Back to making my iOS apps.I’ll come back to it once they fix search and add discovery options.February 10, 2024
It is not just users of Apple Vision Pro that have spotted these problems, as developers working on projects have lamented the difficulty that customers face in finding their apps in search and the complete lack of discoverability. Michael Sayman, a developer who worked on a Vision Pro app called News Ticker, has stated that he won't be building apps for it until discoverability is fixed.
@benhylak, a former designer for Apple, took to X to express his disappointment in discoverability, saying “there's some really cool apps for visionOS, they're just very hard to find”.
Problems of discoverability seem like the growing pains that stem from a new concept for Apple being introduced to its customers. These discoverability problems are likely a priority for Apple to fix as better discoverability encourages the use of the headset for both developers and users but some, like @ActovGodd, believe it should have been there “out the gate”.
