Digital Trends’ Alex Blake interviewed Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of worldwide developer relations and Steve Sinclair, senior director of product marketing for Apple Vision Pro, along with several developers about the ways the company is encouraging development for its upcoming headset.

According to Sinclair:

One of the things that we’ve observed is that when people first put on Vision Pro, they’re so blown away by the new spatial experiences that they see that they oftentimes forget that they’re actually wearing something.

When we’re working with developers,” he continues, “we really try to stress the importance of creating new experiences that take advantage of all those capabilities.” That means building apps that “flex from windows to apps to being able to create fully immersive applications that transport you somewhere else. Because those are the things that customers and users are going to be excited about.”

Developer Ryan McLeod, the creator of the iOS and iPadOS game Blackbox, believes hands-on time with the Vision Pro hardware is key for developer adoption:

“It’s hard for me to imagine being inspired enough to build Blackbox for Vision Pro without having had ample hands-on time,” he notes. “I think it’s going to be critically important that as many developers as possible — especially smaller indie teams — get that opportunity and support for the platform.”

McLeod suggests that to get the Vision Pro in as many developers’ hands as possible:

Apple could help by “continuing to push beyond the traditional yearly WWDC cycle to continuously release more example apps, more API documentation, more sessions, and more opportunities to talk directly with engineers at Apple.”

Mark Gurman of Bloomberg posted on Twitter in early August that he’d heard that the Vision Pro labs were “under-filled with a small number of developers.” As valuable as the labs seem to have been to those who have attended, so far, they’ve only been held in Cupertino and a handful of large cities in a limited number of countries and on relatively short notice. Hopefully, as the weeks pass, Apple can schedule labs further out, expand the number of locations, and offer more developer kits. It’s that sort of hands-on experience that will get developers excited, drive the adoption of visionOS, and ensure there are apps for customers when Vision Pro ships next year.

Excellent developer-focused take on the Vision Pro by David Smith, who also tested one last week at Apple Park. I particularly liked his reasoning for why it’s important to begin understanding a new Apple platform sooner rather than later:

Another reason I want to develop for visionOS from the start is that it is the only way I know for developing what I’ll call “Platform Intuition”.

This year watchOS 10 introduced a variety of structural and design changes. What was fascinating (and quite satisfying) to see was how many of these changes were things that I was already doing in Pedometer++ (and had discussed their rationale in my Design Diary). This “simultaneous invention” was not really all that surprising, as it is the natural result of my spending years and years becoming intimately familiar with watchOS and thus having an intuition about what would work best for it.

That intuition is developed by following a platform’s development from its early stages. You have to have seen and experienced all the attempts and missteps along the way to know where the next logical step is. Waiting until a platform is mature and then starting to work on it then will let you skip all the messy parts in the middle, but also leave you with only answers to the “what” questions, not so much the “why” questions.

I want that “Platform Intuition” for visionOS and the only way I know how to attain it is to begin my journey with it from the start.

As Underscore concludes, Widgetsmith will be on visionOS from day one in 2024.