Buying all the 194 paid apps available for Apple’s Vision Pro will only set you back $US1,100.08, according to app intelligence firm Appfigures. Considering you just coughed up $US3,500 to buy the company’s newest headset, that’s kind of a bargain.
Appfigures analyzed the 730 apps optimized for the Vision Pro—which includes apps exclusive to the headset as well as iOS apps that added a native Vision Pro experience—to get a better understanding of how developers were responding to Apple’s newest device. (There are more than one million iOS and iPadOS apps compatible with the Vision Pro, but these aren’t designed specifically for the Vision Pro and weren’t included in the analysis).
Appfigures found that 73% of Vision Pro optimized apps were either paid (26.5%) or required a subscription (46.7%). Lively Elements, an interactive periodic table of elements, was the highest-priced app at $US98. Meanwhile, Spatial Air Timer, an app that lets you set an unlimited amount of 3D timers, was the lowest priced at $US0.57. Only 26.7% of Vision Pro-optimized apps were completely free.
The breakdown is surprising and in stark contrast to the App Store, where paid apps make up roughly 5% of the offerings. But this is to be expected at the beginning of the device’s life cycle. There’s simply not a ton of money in ad-supported apps or data harvesting when a device is so new to the market.
Some developers are already reporting making bank. Christian Selig, for instance, said his app Juno—which the developer made to browse YouTube on the Vision Pro since YouTube hasn’t launched a native app for the device yet—had “officially paid for the price of my Vision Pro” one day after the headset went on sale.
Selig is widely known online for being the developer behind Apollo, a third-party app for browsing Reddit that closed in 2023.
Only time will tell if paid and subscription apps continue to dominate Vision Pro’s native app offerings. For now, the funniest thing is that the cost of all 194 paid apps on the Vision Pro is roughly the same as the infamous “I Am Rich” app, a 2008 joke app priced at $US1,000 that literally only displayed the following text: “I am rich. I deserve it. I am good, healthy & successful.”
Something tells me more than one new owner of the Apple Vision Pro told themselves the same thing when buying the Cyberpunk-esque headset.