TikTok this week became one of the relatively few (~1000) companies to develop a Vision Pro app. Positioned as a “reimagined” user experience, TikTok wants to underscore that this app isn’t just a port of its mobile UX, and is differentiated from the option to View TikTok via the browser on Vision Pro.
All of that translates to being more immersive. Colors and details pop on the larger virtual screen inside the Vision Pro. And you can watch TikTok videos in immersive locations, such as Yosemite or the moon. That list will grow and likely include customized imagery, similar to customized iPhone home screens.
But more important than arguably-gimmicky virtual viewing environments, the design and real-estate challenges of the mobile app go away in the more spacious expanses of the Vision Pro. For example, navigation elements are moved off to the side so that there’s more real estate for videos themselves.
Early-Mover Advantage
Other UX highlights? The comments section for each video is moved to the side of the TikTok scrolling feed. That compares to the mobile UX where comments are on top of videos. Similarly, clicking on someone’s profile in the mobile app takes you to their page, leaving behind what you were watching.
With Vision Pro, users can view all of these things at once. In other words, there’s more elbow room. All of the buttons, and sections of a given app can conceivably occupy the spatial real estate around one’s room, rather than battling for real estate within the zero-sum rectangles we’ve come to love.
That last part represents the real opportunity with Vision Pro. Though most punditry and trolling so far has focused on the hardware – and the wacky places people are being spotted with the device – the more meaningful angle is how developers will translate their existing experiences to Vision Pro.
In that sense, it seems the world is divided between companies jumping into Vision Pro with both feet and those taking a wait-and-see approach. The latter is probably more prudent (holdouts including Netflix and YouTube), but the former (Slack, Zoom, and Disney+) could gain an early-mover advantage.
Learning Curve
More importantly, it’s about feeling out a new platform’s nuances and gaining native footing. This was a years-long learning curve in early days of the iPhone – not that we’re saying Vision Pro will necessarily be as big of a platform. Early apps were gimmicks and small websites… until they struck a native cord.
The latter includes apps whose core functions utilize the sensors and unique aspects of the hardware, such as Foursquare (GPS), Snapchat (camera), and Shazam (mic). Those apps hit their stride around 2009 – about a year after the app store launched in ’08 and two years after the iPhone launched.
So that’s the process we’ll see play out with the Vision Pro app. And that brings us back to TikTok. Is its Vision Pro app native enough? Or is it a gimmicky port of its mobile UX? It seems to strike the former tones, but the jury is still early on what Vision Pro-native means. We’ll be tracking that process closely.
