When Apple revealed the Vision Pro in 2023, it called the $3,500 headset its next “major platform.” Two years later, and a year after going on sale, the device is thin on apps. 

Apple doesn’t regularly release stats on the number of Vision Pro apps that are available, and it’s hard to tell how many new apps come out in any given month. According to consultancy AppFigures, which tracks Apple’s platforms, the number of new Vision Pro apps has declined every month since the device hit the market in February 2024.

When Apple unveiled the Vision Pro, executives said that developers would be able to create new experiences that weren’t possible with traditional computers. But so far, top developers remain mostly focused elsewhere, and major tech companies like Google, Meta and Netflix have yet to release their most important apps for the headset.

Many of the new apps and ideas for the Vision Pro are coming from independent developers, hacking on the weekends while holding down day jobs. 

One person in the indie camp is Adam Roszyk, a programmer in Poland who has created 17 Vision Pro apps since the headset was first released.

For $4, Roszyk’s Night Vision app lets a Vision Pro user tap the depth-sensing cameras of the device to see objects in the dark. If you spend $5, you can perform a chore in a Luigi’s Mansion-like video game using the app Vacuume, which overlays virtual coins on your floor that you can vacuum up, along with any real dirt or dust. And for $6, Roszyk’s app Scan Export lets users create a 3D digital scan of an entire building just by walking around, a useful tool for those in construction or real estate. 

“We are still early, and we don’t really know how it can be really useful in your life,” Roszyk said. “There’s so many different ideas that just come to your mind.”

Roszyk continues to work on Vision Pro apps because he said he believes “spatial computing” — Apple’s preferred terminology for headset and glasses technology that can integrate 3D objects with the world around them — will be the next big platform. Roszyk is betting that developing apps now can put him in prime position when more people are walking around with a Vision Pro or, perhaps some day, lightweight glasses. 

“This type of computing is the future,” Roszyk said. “I would definitely compare it to the first iPhones.”

Roszyk’s efforts have made him money, but not enough for Vision Pro development to become his full-time job. His 17 apps have cleared about $4,000 on the App Store in the last three months. That number is growing as he releases more apps and more people find out about them, Roszyk said. 

Apple updated its most recent Vision Pro app count in August, with CEO Tim Cook telling investors on an earnings call that the platform had 2,500 apps. That number covers fully immersive apps that overlay virtual objects over the real world as well as 2D apps with some spatial components.

By AppFigures’ count, less than 1,900 of these apps remained active at the end of January.

Apple declined to comment.

Rival Meta in 2023 said that it had 500 apps in its Quest store, and the company last year said that number had multiplied by 10.

The Quest 3S, which has many of the same features as the Vision Pro, starts at $300. Meta also sold millions of its predecessors in recent years. While Meta hasn’t revealed how many users it has, its Meta Quest app was downloaded about 6 million times in 2024, according to AppFigures data, a useful proxy because users need to download the app in order to set up the headset.

There are also about 1.5 million Vision Pro apps that are ported versions of iPhone and iPad apps. Apple automatically ports iPhone and iPad apps to the Vision Pro when they’re uploaded, but companies can decline. Those apps can be used inside the headset but appear as 2D flat screens. Meta started to emulate that strategy last year with 2D Android apps for Quest, but the company doesn’t have the same library of millions of existing mobile apps.

Apple doesn’t publish Vision Pro sales, but one estimate from IDC suggests fewer than 1 million devices have been sold.

Some services like Netflix and YouTube, and game streaming services like Nvidia GeForce Now can be accessed through the Apple Vision Pro’s browser. And existing apps often receive updates that introduce a spatial mode, such as the NBA scores app, which recently got an experimental feature that allows users to watch a live basketball game as if the players were miniature figurines on a table.

Apple Arcade, a monthly game subscription from Apple, does require that its titles support the Vision Pro in addition to iPhones and iPads. Apple Arcade developers are paid by Apple and their apps are free to subscribers.

Although many of those games are 2D, some are exclusive to the Vision Pro. In January, Apple released Gears & Goo, a Vision Pro app that enables the player to control an army of goofy frog-like characters on a table in the real world.

Meanwhile, Meta is actively courting VR developers with a promise that they can make money. Meta in January said that its payment volume for Quest headsets rose by 12% last year, although it didn’t cite a total number. Meta has also said it has 200 apps that have made more than $1 million through software sales.

A year after the iPhone App Store was launched in 2008, Apple was crowing about the platform having 50 million customers, 2 billion downloads and 85,000 apps. Apple regularly told investors and developers how much money it had paid from App Store sales — it hasn’t released any similar stat for the Vision Pro.

Many in the VR industry hoped Apple’s entry would kick off a boom like the iPhone did for mobile apps, creating fortunes as millions of users sought to fill their new devices with fresh software.

“My assumption back then was whatever Apple releases might be in that final form, so it’s a good idea to be ready as early as possible,” said Nikhil Jacob, who runs Vision Uni, which publishes content about developing apps for the Vision Pro. “But my assumption there ended up being wrong.”

Jacob said he believes that an app developer ecosystem for the Vision Pro will take a lot longer to build out than it did for the iPhone because key pieces are missing. Jacob hopes Apple improves the Vision Pro app store to help users find new apps.

The slow uptake, due largely to the high price tag, has led some to worry that VR and its related technologies are once again entering a lull.

“Winter has come,” said Jarrett Webb, who develops headset apps for Argodesign, a software consultancy. “Even Apple couldn’t produce a winner.”

Still, some optimism remains among Vision Pro developers. 

They say that Apple’s hardware is solid, the company’s developer tools are improving, and that the Vision Pro lays the groundwork for future software and hardware updates. It also helps that Vision Pro owners still seem to be excited to try out new apps.

Apple’s entry into the headset market, combined with Google’s recent announcement of its own Android XR platform, as well as Meta’s billions of dollars of investment signals that there will be a market for VR content, said John Gearty, who worked on the Vision Pro at Apple and is the founder of PulseJet Studios, a VR production house focusing on music. Gearty is hoping for steady growth from the market, but he has tempered his expectations. 

“I don’t think it’s ever going to be hockey stick growth,” he said.

Apple has not said if it will update the Vision Pro. According to analysts, the company is working on a successor. Developers want it to be lighter and less expensive. They welcome any improvements that would get it on more faces.

“Over time, everything gets better, and it too will have its course of getting better and better,” Cook told The Wall Street Journal in October. “I think it’s just arguably a success today from an ecosystem-being-built-out point of view.”

— CNBC’s Jonathan Vanian contributed to this report.

Chinese artificial intelligence lab DeepSeek roiled markets in January, setting off a massive tech and semiconductor selloff after unveiling AI models that it said were cheaper and more efficient than American ones. 

But the underlying fears and breakthroughs that sparked the selling go much deeper than one AI startup. Silicon Valley is now reckoning with a technique in AI development called distillation, one that could upend the AI leaderboard. 

Distillation is a process of extracting knowledge from a larger AI model to create a smaller one. It can allow a small team with virtually no resources to make an advanced model.

A leading tech company invests years and millions of dollars developing a top-tier model from scratch. Then a smaller team such as DeepSeek swoops in and trains its own, more specialized model by asking the larger “teacher” model questions. The process creates a new model that’s nearly as capable as the big company’s model but trains more quickly and efficiently. 

“This distillation technique is just so extremely powerful and so extremely cheap, and it’s just available to anyone,” said Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, adding that he expects to see innovation when it comes to how large language models, or LLMs, are built. “We’re going to see so much competition for LLMs. That’s what’s going to happen in this new era we’re entering.” 

Distillation is now enabling less-capitalized startups and research labs to compete at the cutting edge faster than ever before.

Using this technique, researchers at Berkeley said, they recreated OpenAI’s reasoning model for $450 in 19 hours last month. Soon after, researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington created their own reasoning model in just 26 minutes, using less than $50 in compute credits, they said. The startup Hugging Face recreated OpenAI’s newest and flashiest feature, Deep Research, as a 24-hour coding challenge. 

DeepSeek didn’t invent distillation, but it woke up the AI world to its disruptive potential. It also ushered in the rise of a new open-source order — a belief that transparency and accessibility drive innovation faster than closed-door research.

“Open source always wins in the tech industry,” said Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean, which makes an AI-powered search engine for enterprises. “You cannot beat the momentum that a successful open-source project is able to actually generate.” 

OpenAI itself has walked back its closed-source strategy in the wake of DeepSeek’s accomplishment.

“Personally I think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open-source strategy,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a post on Reddit on Jan. 31. 

The combination of distillation’s newfound traction and open source’s rise in popularity is completely altering the competitive dynamics in AI. 

Watch the video to learn more.

STOCKHOLM — Executives at U.S. tech giants Google and Meta said that Europe’s artificial intelligence industry is being held back by excessive regulation, adding to rhetoric from Donald Trump’s administration that the region’s strict tech rules are choking innovation.

Speaking at the Techarena tech conference in Stockholm, Sweden, public policy chiefs at both Google and Meta used the stage as a platform to voice their concerns about the bloc’s strict approach to regulating technologies such as AI and machine learning.

“I think there is now broad consensus that European regulation around technology has its issues, and sometimes it’s too fragmented, like GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation], sometimes it goes too far, like the AI Act,” Chris Yiu, Meta’s director of public policy, told an audience of tech founders and investors at Techarena on Thursday.

“But the net result of all of that is that products get delayed or get watered down and European citizens and consumers suffer,” he said.

Yiu pulled out a pair of Meta’s recently launched Ray-Ban branded glasses, which use AI to translate speech from one language to another or describe images for the visually impaired.

“This is a profound and very human application of the technology, and it is slow to arrive in Europe because of the issues that we have around regulation,” Yiu said.

Meta only began rolling out AI features for its Ray-Ban Meta glasses in some European countries in November, after a delay the firm claimed was caused by the need to reach compliance with Europe’s “complex regulatory system.”

Meta previously expressed concerns about its ability to comply with the AI Act, a landmark EU law that establishes a legal and regulatory framework for the technology, flagging “unpredictable” implementation was a core issue.

The firm also said that GDPR — the EU’s data privacy framework introduced in 2018 — held up the launch of its glasses in EU countries due to issues surrounding Meta’s use of Instagram and Facebook user data to train its AI models.

Dorothy Chou, Google DeepMind’s head of public policy, said a key problem with Europe’s approach to regulating artificial intelligence technology was that the the AI Act was devised before ChatGPT had even come out.

The AI Act was first introduced by the European Commission, the EU’s executive body, in April 2021. OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022.

“There is a way to use policy to create a better investment environment when it’s done in a way that promotes business” Chou said, referring to the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act as an example of policy that has led to benefits, like subsidies for electric vehicles.

“I think what’s difficult is when you are regulating on a time scale that doesn’t match the technology,” Chou added. “I think what we need to do is both regulate to ensure that there is responsible application of technology, while also ensuring that the industry is thriving it all the right ways.”

Big Tech firms more generally have been upping their rhetoric against the EU’s approach to tech regulation and ramping up lobbying efforts in an attempt to soften aspects of the AI Act.

Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs, told Politico last month that the EU’s code of practice for general-purpose AI (GPAI) models — which refers to systems like OpenAI’s GPT family of large language models, or LLMs — was a “step in the wrong direction.”

The EU AI Office, a newly created body overseeing models under the AI Act, published a second-draft code of practice for GPAI systems in December.

Earlier this month, Meta’s newly appointed Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan suggested in a live-streamed interview at an event in Brussels that the tech giant would not sign up to the code in its current form.

The rules, he said, go “beyond the requirements” of the AI Act and impose “unworkable and technically unfeasible requirements.”

Tech giants’ pleas for softer EU tech regulation have been emboldened of late by President Donald Trump’s new administration.

At the international AI Action Summit in Paris last week, U.S. Vice President JD Vance blasted Europe for being too heavily focused on regulating artificial intelligence rather than embracing the technology’s growth potential.

Harmonizing EU rules for startups

Big Tech weren’t alone in calling for a more simplified regulatory regime for technology firms operating in Europe.

Several venture capitalists investing in European tech startups also decried complex regulatory compliance burdens on their portfolio companies.

Antoine Moyroud, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, said that whereas the U.S. has been pushing forward initiatives such as the $500 billion Stargate investment project that strike a “hopeful” message around AI,” Europe’s narrative tends to be more “dramatic.”

The region needs to start thinking “beyond GDPR, beyond the EU AI Act” and producing technological success stories to get people “excited” about the promise of the technology.

Lightspeed are investors in French AI unicorn Mistral, which is often touted as Europe’s key competitor to OpenAI.

Last year, tech entrepreneurs in the region proposed a new initiative to address fragmented market regulations across the 27-member bloc by establishing a so-called “28th regime.” These proposed legal frameworks within the EU offer firms an alternative to member states’ own national rules, rather than replacing them.

For example, there’s a European Company Statute under the 28th regime that makes it simpler to set up public limited liability companies in the EU.

The likes of Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus are among the startup founders looking to set up a new entity under the 28th regime, called “EU Inc.”

“Europe is a fragmented place, and what you want to do is [to] be able to hire across any country,” Luke Pappas, a London-based partner for venture capital firm NEA, told CNBC in an interview on the sidelines of Techarena.

A key issue with attracting talent in this way, according to Pappas, is that currently “the process of giving equity cross border in Europe is not very easy.”

“If we can standardize equity, for example, that will dramatically help,” he added.