I still think there’s a lot of room for growth, but the state of the content is better than before. It’s not enough to keep you entertained for hours a day, but enough to put on a little headset once a week. This was not the case a year ago.
The software support situation is also in a similar situation.
App support has mostly been discontinued in the year 2024
Many of us have a set of apps that are foundational to our personal approach to daily productivity. For me, primarily a macOS user, they are:
- firefox
- spark
- to do list
- obsidian
- raycast
- Loose
- visual studio code
- cloud
- 1 password
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… not even Spotlight. This may all be unusual, but it has never been a problem on macOS, nor has it been on iOS for the past few years.
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, not Cloud, even though a Cloud app for iPad exists. (Though ChatGPT’s iPad app does work.) Of course VS Code isn’t available, but I didn’t expect that.
Not a single one of these applications has an actual VisionOS app. That’s too bad, because I can think of a lot of neat things that the spatial computing version can do. Imagine browsing your Obsidian graphs in augmented reality! Alas, I can only dream.
You can tell native apps from iPad ones: the iPad ones have rectangular icons within a circle, while the native apps fill the entire circle.
Credit: Samuel Exon
If you’re not such a big productivity software whiz like me and you use Apple’s built-in apps, things look a little better, but surprisingly, there are still some apps that you would imagine would have really great spatial computing features – like Apple Maps – that don’t. Maps is also an iPad app.
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