“Will Your Product Run on Apple Vision Pro?” Here Is What I?Say
It sounds like Vision Pro might be an excellent platform for our product in the future. But like most other people, I haven’t had my eyes and nose on it, or seen the developer kit for it?yet.
Welcome to the era of spatial computing.
Apple Vision Pro seamlessly blends digital content with your physical space.
You navigate simply by using your eyes, hands, and voice.
So you can do the things you love in ways never possible before.
You’ve never seen anything like this before.
Five sentences of marketing from the most valuable tech company on Earth, some videos from the WWDC, a hefty price tag, and the whole world starts talking about whether the Apple Vision Pro will be the next big thing in technology. That is before having seen the thing at all.
As a B2B SaaS entrepreneur working closely with Apple, I am often asked whether our product will run on Vision Pro.
Before diving into the answer to that question, let me briefly introduce you to our field of activity and our product.
We are in the unsexy, no-nonsense, but relevant business of electronic documentation.
Awwww, electronic documentation. How exciting.
Well, ever thought of digitizing the cockpit of an aircraft? Or about taking out some of the pains of ISO 9001 / 27001 for small companies? Or about bringing the relevant information to firefighters on the frontline to get their mission done?
Think again. Electronic documentation is quite exciting. Working with pilots, entrepreneurs, and firefighters. Making sure they see the relevant information on the frontline, always up to date and filtered for their current mission.
Today, we use iPads and iPhones as the frontline platform for our product.
Sounds like the Vision Pro might be an excellent platform for our product in the future. But like most other people, I haven’t had my eyes and nose on it, or seen the developer kit for it yet.
Nevertheless, here are my thoughts on how I would approach bringing our product to Vision Pro.
1. Industry?Fit
Always remember that Apple is primarily a B2C company. They spark demand by creating excellent products every consumer wants to own. And once the broad public uses and loves the products, Apple pushes for B2B customers to buy and use their products in corporate contexts.
I vividly remember the fierce discussions in my airline days at the beginning of the 2010s. Aircrews came home from their layovers in the United States, showing off their brand-new iPads before they were available in Europe. Some three years later, those crews wanted to have iPads as their Electronic Flight Bags (EFBs), which were still 100% Windows devices at the time. In 2013, people still said that iPads in a cockpit were extremely unsafe and there would never be an iPad EFB. Ten years later, you have to go quite far to find an airline that still uses Windows devices as their EFBs.
Take this lesson into consideration when talking about Vision Pro. I think it will be a long time before we see it in a flight deck.
Step-by-step is a good recipe to get things done, but step-by-step takes time. So for our product on the Vision Pro, I wouldn’t start with aviation or firefighters.
I would start with manufacturing companies using our product for their fully digital ISO 9001 documentation. Having work instructions and processes available based on location, view direction, state of machinery, or other colleagues in the same room could greatly increase process adherence, which is really what ISO 9001 is all about.
And instead of pulling out your iPhone or iPad all the time, a hands-free device that adds some spatial context might make all the difference.
2. Adapt App?Elements
Remember the days of the first iPads? Some apps weren’t optimized for the iPad yet, so they were displayed in the same viewport as the iPhone. As a goodie, you could press a 2x zoom button to better fill the screen with the scaled iPhone app. Wow.
It took Apple some years to come up with iPadOS, which fully leveraged functions such as the split view that don’t make sense in iOS for iPhone.
With Vision Pro, I guess that developers need to adapt their applications for Vision Pro right from the start. It won’t make sense to port an iPad application without changes to the Apple Vision Pro, as those two devices are controlled completely differently. I guess that’s the reason why running iPad apps on Macs never became that popular?—?a touch-optimized app on a mouse-and-keyboard device is not the same.
Let’s return to our digital documentation product for a more specific discussion of what an adaptation for Vision Pro might mean.
You navigate simply by using your eyes, hands, and voice.
Voice-enabling the search function will be important. Filtering away unnecessary information will need a hand gesture. Eye control will allow measuring what a user has read, and how long he spent on specific content.
I’m sure there will be many more app elements adaptations required, once the full software development kit is published and developers start building Vision Pro apps.
3. Adapt Information Layout
This will be the biggest endeavor. Just like a PDF in page layout on an iPad is not a digital document, a modularized digital document on an iPad will not be what users want on the Vision Pro.
Apple Vision Pro seamlessly blends digital content with your physical space.
In our context, this will mean breaking free of the document and showing relevant information on a modular level on Vision Pro. Whilst our information architecture is already modular today, most of our customers (and their authorities) still live very much in a document world.
Last but not least, we will need to adapt the metadata of our information modules. Today, we use tags to filter information. On the Vision Pro, we will need to add meta information to filter information not just for tags, but also for location, direction of sight, state of machinery, etc.
Conclusion: Step-by-Step
So there is lots to do to take an app to Vision Pro. However, the Vision Pro needs to become widely available first. So just like integrating ChatGPT into our product, working on a Vision Pro app might be hugely important in the future, but it’s not the most urgent topic right now.
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