As announced on Monday, January 8th, Apple will start selling Apple Vision Pro online and in-store on February 2nd, with pre-orders beginning on January 19th, limited to the USA for now.
Apple Vision Pro is the first mixed reality headset created by Apple and announced last June at WWDC23. It’s powered by visionOS, their first spatial computing operating system, which introduces a completely new design language featuring the glass material. visionOS is backward compatible with iOS apps and you can download apps — both for visionOS or iOS — from the visionOS App Store.
I had the great opportunity to get my hands on Apple Vision Pro last August at the Developer Labs in Munich, and the experience was amazing. It’s a convergence of all Apple devices, and you can clearly feel both from the design and during testing. visionOS is capable to provide a next generation user experience, while abstracting much of the underlying technologies through Swift and SwiftUI, thus easing the process of building apps for this new operating system.
And, believe me, the visionOS Simulator is not even half the real experience.
From a simple “Hello world” app to the ultimate 3D game, visionOS provides a platform to build a wide variety of spectacular user experiences. Let’s see in this article how you can prepare your apps for the visionOS App Store.
Before jumping into your first spatial app release, make sure to check all the items in this checklist provided by Apple.
Scenario 1: you already have an app available on the iOS App Store
In this scenario, you don’t have to do anything. Almost. All new apps and existing apps available on the iOS/iPadOS App Store will automatically be available on the visionOS App Store, as you can see since last year on the App Store Connect dashboard:
iOS apps on visionOS will run in compatibility mode (or, “Designed for iPhone/iPad”): this means that they will be displayed within a locked window with the original iPhone or iPad size ratio (read it as compact size class), following the same look-and-feel of iOS. You can move your app in the shared space, but resizing it will just scale the original canvas. Or you can rotate the app by tapping the button on top right corner, triggering the same behaviour of rotating your iPhone/iPad.
iOS Compatible Apps are available under the “Compatible Apps” folder. But your app won’t sit there alone: other iOS apps have not been ported to the shared space, namely Maps, Calendar, News, Reminders and Shortcuts (at least for what we see in the simulator).
It may be that your app is not one hundred percent ready for this new platform, or you may not want to publish an app to a new App Store that is currently available in the US only and for a real device that you may not yet have access to. In this case, go back to App Store Connect and simply click “Edit Availability” and uncheck from the list the apps that you don’t want to publish on the visionOS App Store. Don’t forget to click Save.
You don’t have to create specific marketing material for visionOS (description, screenshots, etc.), since you will see the existing ones from iOS on the visionOS App Store.
That’s all, folks!
Oh, well, that’s not all. Because some features provided by the iOS SDK are not available on visionOS, regardless of compatibility mode. For example, the camera!
So make sure to update your user experience in order to handle these edge cases — even if your app doesn’t support visionOS. Regarding the camera, compatible apps will receive an empty, black frame with a “no camera” symbol 🚫 for the back camera. You will get the front camera only when an active Persona is shown.
Scenario 2: you started from scratch or ported your app to visionOS, and it’s ready for the visionOS App Store
Well, congrats! You were among the first developers in the world to get your hands on visionOS and, if you were lucky enough to book a Developer Lab, on Apple Vision Pro! Now it’s time for a new phase: to be among the first developers to publish a native visionOS app on the visionOS App Store!
The process of publishing an app for the visionOS App Store is quite similar to what you are used to with other Apple platforms.
First, create a new app on App Store Connect or, if you already have one, add visionOS as a platform for your new spatial app.
Next, add your marketing material as you are used to doing on other platforms: this includes app previews and screenshots, promotional text, keywords, description, support URLs and app review information.
You will find a new section, App Motion Information, to assess whether your app makes use of high motion or not, which may be annoying to some users. This information will be displayed on the app page. Here’s the support article from Apple.
Then, head back to Xcode in order to first create your distribution binary and then submit it to the App Store. Check that everything is okay with signing, so that your developer team is selected and correct provisioning profiles are in place.
After, check that the selected target device is “Any visionOS device (arm64)” and go to Product > Archive. Xcode will start building the binary for visionOS. In a few minutes the Organizer window should appear. Here, select the binary that has been just created (if it’s not already selected) and click on “Distribute App”. Choose “TestFlight & App Store” and follow the steps in the Organizer.
Once your app has been processed by the App Store, choose the correct build from the app detail page on App Store Connect, send it to Apple and good luck! ☘️
Note for those who are used to shipping their apps with the lovely fastlane: as the final version of Xcode 15.2 has been released just a few days ago, gym (the build tool of fastlane) doesn’t yet support visionOS. You can check the current status of the implementation and even provide support in this PR.
That’s really all for now!
Any feedback — praise, (constructive) criticism, suggestions — is welcome, as this is my first article on Medium. I will try to update the article as more information emerges in the upcoming days and weeks, and I’ll write more about Vision Pro on our Medium!
About letvar
letvar is a team of creatives based in San Marino 🇸🇲 and focused on crafting apps for any kind of device, including Apple Vision Pro. We are here to bring your ideas to the shared space of visionOS: let’s get in touch!
www.letvar.io
The author
Nicola Giancecchi
Co-founder @ letvar
Feedbacks are welcome! hello@letvar.io
