In January, YouTube declared that it had no immediate plans to support the Apple headgear.
Reportedly, Google intends to create a YouTube software that will be compatible with the Apple Vision Pro. According to The Verge, a spokeswoman for YouTube has confirmed the business’s intention to develop a native Vision Pro app. In the meanwhile, the company is working to optimize YouTube for Safari as an interim measure. An unofficial YouTube software for Apple’s $3,500 headset was released by developer Christian Selig, who was also responsible for the popular Apollo app that Reddit canceled in 2023. This is what prompted the developer to do the turnaround.
According to reports, a spokesperson for YouTube named Jessica Gibby sent an email to Nilay Patel of The Verge, stating, “We are excited to see Vision Pro launch, and we are supporting it by ensuring that YouTube users have a great experience in Safari.” Despite the fact that we are unable to disclose any precise plans at this time, we are able to affirm that a Vision Pro app is currently on our development path.
In spite of the fact that Vision Pro was released with more than 600 native applications, YouTube stated as recently as January 19 that it had no plans to develop a Vision Pro application. Additionally, Netflix is a prominent example of a holdout. A spokeswoman for YouTube informed Engadget at the time that the business had no intentions to make its iPad app available on the visionOS App Store. This was another statement made by the spokesperson. When it comes to getting their program onto Apple’s “spatial computing” gadget, developers can get their applications onto the iPad by porting it. This process is relatively quick and uncomplicated.
Over the course of the past two and a half weeks, the corporation took a different stance on something. According to one opinion, Apple’s mixed reality headset appears to be off to a solid start despite its astronomical price of $3,500. This assumption is based on the fact that the company’s most devoted and wealthy customers swiftly placed pre-orders for the augmented reality headset. During its inaugural weekend, Apple reportedly sold somewhere between 160,000 and 180,000 headsets, according to an analyst named Ming-Chi Kuo, who has ample sources of information.
One such hypothesis is that YouTube observed a third-party developer making up for the slack that it had been experiencing. Juno was an unofficial third-party YouTube app that was accessible at the time of its inception. It was developed by Christian Selig, who was also the creator of the Apollo for Reddit app, which has since been discontinued. He is a former Apple engineer and the inventor of one of the most popular Reddit apps for iOS users (before the company’s contentious API rules virtually destroyed most third-party Reddit apps). As a result, Selig has a great amount of confidence and status among Apple device users.
“YouTube is probably one of the parts of the internet that I consume the most, so I was more than a little sad when YouTube announced that they do not have plans to build a visionOS app, and disabled the option to load the iPad app,” Selig noted in a blog post that was published the previous week. The only option left for you is Safari, and while the website is decent, it does not have the feel of a visionOS application one bit.
Both 3D and 360-degree videos are supported on YouTube; however, neither of these formats is currently compatible with Vision Pro. Regarding whether or whether the company intends to incorporate those into its software, it is not yet apparent.