The Best Apple Vision Pro Apps

Apple's entertainment app is, of course, available on the Vision Pro, and it's loaded with both the 2D movies and shows you'd expect, as well as 3D and immersive content exclusive to the headset.

Apple Books doesn't have a native visionOS app, but you can get the iPad version on the Vision Pro to read books purchased through Apple. If you have a large library on Amazon, you'll have to access them through Safari, as there isn't a compatible app for Kindle.

Good news, anime fans: Crunchyroll has a visionOS app. You can sit back and watch your favorite anime at your leisure. I recommend Shangri-La Frontier if you want a Sword Art Online-like, not-quite-Isekai that is clearly written and localized by gaming fans. And, you know, actually good.

Disney+ was one of the first streaming services to announce an app for the Vision Pro, and it went all out. Not only are there four very detailed 3D theaters to watch Disney content in, but you can watch dozens of Disney, Marvel, and Star Wars films in 3D.

Explore POV demonstrates that an immersive video app doesn't have to be complicated to be enjoyable. This simple app lets you watch 180-degree video tours of a handful of natural environments in New Zealand. You can wander down a river, climb a mountain, and walk along a ridgeline during sunset. It's relaxing, and it's free.

With the Vision Pro, you can actually have an IMAX theater in your home, at least one just for yourself. The IMAX app lets you watch IMAX-exclusive videos, both free and rentable, on a massive virtual screen appropriate for the format.

Max is another service with a dedicated app for the Vision Pro, and there are plenty of movies and shows to watch on it. It isn't quite as feature-filled as the Disney+ app, but if you want, you can watch movies in front of a virtual Iron Throne.

Apple Music is available on the Vision Pro, with some perks you won't get on the Apple TV app. Besides regular music, you can listen to spatial audio tracks that really make you feel like you're surrounded by instruments thanks to the headset's excellent speakers.

If you want free content, Pluto TV is one of the best for both on-demand and live streams. It has a visionOS app with a surprisingly massive library of movies and shows.

Apple's Game Room app on Apple Arcade has received a massive overhaul for the Vision Pro compared with its iOS and iPadOS versions. It lets you play chess, hearts, solitaire, and legally distinct versions of Battleship and Yahtzee in fully rendered 3D. The chess board sits in front of you like it's there, letting you select pieces with your eyes and then pinch and drag them with your fingers to move them around.

This simple Apple Arcade puzzle game challenges you to clear out connecting groups of like-colored blocks with physics. The blocks make up a floating cylindrical tower you can spin around. Look at a block and tap it to make that block, and every block of the same color touching it disappear, shifting all the remaining blocks in the tower. Remove enough blocks before you knock down the whole tower to win.

This one surprised me. Not only is the iPad app for Steam Link compatible with the Vision Pro, but it works perfectly. You can pair a gamepad with the Vision Pro and play games streamed from your local gaming PC running Steam. I found the experience incredibly responsive over my Wi-Fi 6 network.

Part puzzle game, part chill-out experience, Stitch. (the period is in the name) puts a virtual embroidery ring in front of you and makes you fill patterns with different colors. It's very relaxing, and you don't have to worry about jabbing yourself with needles.

Hey, remember Fruit Ninja? It's back, in visionOS form!

Beat Saber isn't on the Vision Pro yet, but Synth Riders is the next best thing. The premise is familiar: Glowing spheres fly at you in time to music and you have to bat them with your hands. It's fun, like nearly all rhythm games, and it works perfectly in the context of AR/VR.

Coders should appreciate the availability of Runestone on the Vision Pro. This native visionOS app is a powerful text editor with color-coded elements and auto-formatting features for dozens of programming languages.

Google apps are missing from the Vision Pro, even in the form of compatible iPad apps, but you can access most of them through Safari so you can still work in Docs and Sheets. We're hoping that Google software will be available as compatible or native visionOS apps in the future, though.

Scrivener is one of my favorite tools for fiction writing. It lets you work on your manuscript with extensive formatting options, manage notes, and create outlines. Its iPad app also works on the Vision Pro, and you can use a Bluetooth keyboard with it, too.

Videoconferencing tools abound on the Vision Pro. There's FaceTime for casual calls and Microsoft Teams for work. If your organization uses WebEx, it's there, too.

Museas is a "spatial museum" that lets you look at more than 100 works of art across multiple periods and movements, all for free. Each piece has an informative voice guide discussing its artist and origins. Every painting is very high resolution, so you zoom in, get up close, and really examine the details. Some even have immersive views that put you in a virtual room themed after the piece, with a mixed reality canvas in front of you.

Space is big. Really big. Big enough that it's hard to comprehend how big it is. Space Vision lets you take a tour of the solar system, which itself is pretty standard (but educational) fare for VR/XR headsets. What makes it particularly interesting is its control panel and plethora of sliders. It starts with the typical "this is the solar system" perspective, but it shows just how much the planets, moons, and orbits are scaled. Pull those sliders toward more accurate proportions, and you can see just how massive every planet's orbit is and how tiny so many celestial bodies are compared with others. Incidentally, our moon is pretty far away, but it's also huge, about a third the size of Earth without scaling.