Apple’s Vision Pro mixed-reality headset is coming to the true world on February 2, and all of the previews thus far have proven it to be a terrific bundle of contradictions. It’s succesful however clunky. Mobile however tethered to a battery pack. Exciting however simply so, so expensive.

Perhaps most significantly, it’s a tool Apple touts for its software program potential, however the demonstrations the corporate has given of the Vision Pro thus far reveal that it’s going to characteristic a small variety of appropriate apps at launch. That’s a giant deal for an Apple product, whose predecessors—just like the iPhone—owe a variety of their success to the app ecosystems which have blossomed round them.

“It’s amazing tech, but it’s also very clearly a development kit,” AR/VR developer Brielle Garcia stated in an electronic mail to WIRED concerning the Vision Pro. “The price is way too high for consumers, and there’s no real killer apps for them yet.”

The Vision Pro prices $3,499 for the bottom mannequin, and that’s excluding add-ons like prescription lenses or a carrying case. And regardless that the Vision Pro is very anticipated, it is getting into a sagging market for VR headsets. It’s additionally arriving at a time of bad blood between Apple and its builders, with the corporate climbing up charges for out-of-app purchases. All this creates an unwelcoming atmosphere for Vision Pro apps.

One developer, who requested to not be named out of concern that Apple may blacklist his firm, says the joy of creating one thing for the Vision Pro slipped away after realizing the system’s limitations. “This is the headset we’ve been waiting for for a long time. Once the glow wore off, I mean, we had a lot of questions.”

It didn’t assist that, of their expertise, Apple wasn’t precisely encouraging builders to dive in. Where different firms will attempt to entice builders onto their platforms, Apple’s strategy has been “almost the opposite,” the developer says. “They want us to jump through a lot of hoops to even just be in the conversation of maybe being able to develop this kind of thing.”

Apple has not responded to a request for remark about apps on the Vision Pro.

“Any developer going into working with the Vision Pro will have known what they’re signing up for,” says Leo Gebbie, Principal Analyst of related gadgets on the client analysis agency CCS Insight. He says Apple has a observe report of being very concerned in high quality management with apps, particularly on new {hardware}. “They’re mainly giving them this model new device with an entire host of guidelines and rules about how they need folks to construct the applying. And Apple is even being prescriptive about how they need folks to speak concerning the purposes. They’re basically saying, please construct for our {hardware}, which might be going to promote in very restricted numbers.”

Developers, Gebbie says, are then confronted with the dilemma of investing appreciable time, effort, and cash to develop an app for an viewers that is, at the least for the foreseeable future, fairly small.