I still think there is room for improvement, but the content situation is better than ever. Not enough to keep you entertained for hours a day, but enough to keep you wearing the headset at least once a week or so. A year ago this was not the case.
The situation with software support is in a similar state.
Application support is mostly frozen in 2024.
Many of us have a set of all-in-one apps that underpin our individual approach to daily productivity. For me, primarily a macOS user, this is:
- Firefox
- Spark
- Todoist
- Obsidian
- Raycast
- Weak
- 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… not even Spotlight. All of this may be atypical, but it has never been an issue on either macOS or iOS for several years now.
It's impressive that almost all of them are available on VisionOS, but only because they can run iPad apps as flat virtual windows. Firefox, Spark, Todoist, Obsidian, Slack, 1Password and even Raycast are available as supported iPad apps, but surprisingly Claude is not, although there is a Claude app for iPad. (The ChatGPT iPad app works, however.) VS Code is of course not available, but I didn't expect it to be.
None of these apps have a true VisionOS app. This is too bad, because I can think of a lot of interesting things that versions of spatial computing could do. Imagine viewing an Obsidian chart in augmented reality! Alas, I can only dream.
You can tell the difference between native apps and iPad apps: iPads have rectangular icons nested within circles, while native apps fill the entire circle.
Credit: Samuel Axon
If you're not as big of a productivity software fan as I am and use Apple's built-in apps, things look a little better, but surprisingly there are still a few apps that you think would have really cool spatial computing features (like Apple Maps) that don't. Maps is also just an iPad app.
