I still think there’s significant room to grow, but the content situation is better than ever. It’s not enough to keep you entertained for hours a day, but it’s enough to make putting on the headset for a bit once a week or so worth it. That wasn’t there a year ago.
The software support situation is in a similar state.
App support is mostly frozen in the year 2024
Many of us have a suite of go-to apps that are foundational to our individual approaches to daily productivity. For me, primarily a macOS user, they are:
- Firefox
- Spark
- Todoist
- Obsidian
- Raycast
- Slack
- Visual Studio Code
- Claude
- 1Password
As you can see, I don’t use most of Apple’s built-in apps—no Safari, no Mail, no Reminders, no Passwords, no Notes… no Spotlight, even. All that may be atypical, but it has never been a problem on macOS, nor has it been on iOS for a few years now.
Impressively, almost all of these are available on visionOS—but only because it can run iPad apps as flat, virtual windows. Firefox, Spark, Todoist, Obsidian, Slack, 1Password, and even Raycast are all available as supported iPad apps, but surprisingly, Claude isn’t, even though there is a Claude app for iPads. (ChatGPT’s iPad app works, though.) VS Code isn’t available, of course, but I wasn’t expecting it to be.
Not a single one of these applications has a true visionOS app. That’s too bad, because I can think of lots of neat things spatial computing versions could do. Imagine browsing your Obsidian graph in augmented reality! Alas, I can only dream.
You can tell the native apps from the iPad ones: The iPad ones have rectangular icons nested within circles, whereas the native apps fill the whole circle.
Credit:
Samuel Axon
If you’re not such a huge productivity software geek like me and you use Apple’s built-in apps, things look a little better, but surprisingly, there are still a few apps that you would imagine would have really cool spatial computing features—like Apple Maps—that don’t. Maps, too, is just an iPad app.