Apple loves developers, and developers love it back. In fact, the company loves devs so much it created a conference for them, which has now become its biggest platform for it to launch its greatest new products. 

In Worldwide Developers Conference, or WWDC for short, Apple announced a whole ecosystem for developers embedded in the Vision Pro headset.

Along with releasing what it calls the world’s first spatial computer, Apple also dropped the details of the dev stack behind the new product line. Aiming to replicate the success of their past products’ developer ecosystem, Apple will soon release dev tools that might create the new standard for XR (extended reality), but on Apple’s terms. 

New Vision of Apple’s XR strategy

To go along with its new Vision Pro headset, Apple announced the visionOS operating system. The visionOS SDK builds on Apple’s history of augmented reality dev kits such as RealityKit, ARKit and other AR creation tools. ARKit was Apple’s first foray into harnessing the power of augmented reality, with the company releasing ARKit 6 at WWDC earlier this week. Through ARKit, developers can add AR features like a depth API, people occlusion, Instant AR, motion capture, and more to their applications. 

RealityKit adds on to ARKit to bring realistic elements to AR scenes. UsingRealityKit, developers can introduce realistic physics-based rendering, along with spatial audio and rigid body physics to their apps. In a way, RealityKit forms the foundational elements of what Apple is trying to do with visionOS. 

The biggest thing tying together visionOS with these other dev tools is SwiftUI, Apple’s app creation platform. Based on Swift, this framework will be developers’ primary way of creating experiences on visionOS. Along with SwiftUI and the other APIs, Apple has already put in place a framework to build apps on visionOS.

The company has further fleshed out this framework by integrating Xcode and a new SDK called Reality Composer Pro. This platform will allow developers to easily import and organise various assets, and is closely integrated with Xcode. The Xcode platform itself includes a visionOS SDK and a simulator to help devs build apps on the new system.  

The visionOS SDK handles the translation of commands from these applications to the unique hardware of the Vision Pro. The company has also released comprehensive documentation about how to prepare for working with the SDK, which will be available later this month. 

By integrating dev tools which already have a considerable install base, Apple has already given development on the Vision Pro a head start. This strategy echoes Apple’s history of attention towards the developer ecosystem, which has worked in their favour before. As we can see, there is a common theme here. The coming dev tools will be closely integrated with other elements in the Apple ecosystem, but this also locks devs into a walled garden. 

Flourishing in a walled garden

The iPhone is one of the biggest success stories for Apple’s developer campaigning. After the iPhone launched, Apple made it easy for developers to create new apps on Xcode. They did so by creating an emulated version of the iPhone that devs could deploy their apps on, making the development process faster. This will unlock new use-cases for the Vision Pro, similar to the iPhone app store moment. 

Similarly, when launching the M1 chips, Apple made a translation layer called Rosetta that translated between the older x86 instruction sets and the newer ARM instruction sets. This, when coupled with an easy porting process integrated into Xcode, gave developers time and the means to port over to Apple Silicon. With the M2 and R1 chips powering Vision Pro, developers have more computing power at their disposal. 

Now, with the launch of Vision Pro, Apple is doing the same thing. The visionOS plugs into a host of tightly integrated dev tools across the Apple ecosystem. However, this is the caveat. In a way, most developers are forced to develop for Apple’s products, due to them occupying a sizable chunk of market share across product categories. 

In return, Apple responds by making the dev tools exclusive to their devices and focused on development for their products alone. By doing this, the company has capitalised on an army of developers to flesh out the power of its ecosystem.

The answer to how Apple can do this is simple; extremely tight integration. All Apple devices are manufactured without a lot of variations. This means that, at any given time, developers only need to create apps for a small set of specifications. They don’t need to test it across a huge variety of configurations, like how Android or PC developers need to. 

Thanks to adopting ARM chips across the entire product line, developers can easily run the same apps between iPhones, iPads, Macbooks, and now, the Vision Pro. This solidifies Apple’s metaverse strategy, carried on the back of the tech in the Vision Pro.