It took two years, but YouTube is finally an Apple Vision Pro app.
The news, announced Thursday, might come as a surprise if — like most people — you haven’t tried Apple’s Vision Pro. YouTube always seemed like a perfect fit for Apple’s mixed-reality device, since so many videos there work in 3D, 360 degrees or in 180-degree immersive formats. And yet, Google and Apple had never figured out a way to make it happen before. A third-party YouTube-playing app, Juno, emerged shortly after the Vision Pro’s initial launch, but it was pulled from the App Store.
You always had the option to watch YouTube via the Safari browser. But that experience lacked a lot of the immersive support for 3D and 360-degree videos that Google and Samsung’s Galaxy XR headset, launched last fall, was able to show off.
The new YouTube app should catch the Vision Pro up to a lot of great video options, but I hope it’s also the start of a lot more. Apple and Google’s Gemini partnership could open up camera-enabled AI, similar to what the Galaxy XR offers. Google’s immersive Maps app on the Galaxy XR is fantastic, too. I’d love both of those to be Vision-bound. Maybe YouTube is a foot in the door for the rest of Google’s app support.
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