In this context, what’s relevant is OpenXR. Apple’s visionOS does not natively support OpenXR, the open standard developed by the Khronos Group for cross-platform AR/VR development. Apple has not indicated any plans to adopt OpenXR, choosing instead to promote its proprietary frameworks such as ARKit, RealityKit, and PolySpatial for spatial computing on the Vision Pro.
What Apple is finding, however, is that there’s virtually no consumer or developer appetite for visionOS / Vision Pro.
An excellent comment for it's humor value. (not to ruin the humor with an explanation, but this is a masterful use of sophistry as it's logically sound, but clearly not a serious argument).
Now to add to the unhelpfulness in what I hope is a humorous way, we in fact have some evidence that hell did freeze over:
Ahhh Khronos. Lovely Fahrenheit where Microsoft strung SGI along to make Fahrenheit fail (now Open Scene Graph) and incorporate the IP in Direct3D..
Shitty tactics.
It's a miracle they actually allowed Microsoft to be a member of the Khronos group.
I should try an make an image of Fahrenheit's beta cds some day.
It's my impression that the WebGPU spec design team went to extreme lengths to accommodate Apple's wishes, and Apple in turn does not even support WebGPU in Safari. Why not express vitriol? Apple does not seem to act in good faith.
Confirmed my M1 iPad Pro iOS 18.4.1 also doesn’t have it enabled. Took a bit of digging in the settings app to discover where to enable feature flags too, confirmed it’s off.
It’s disabled still on my iPhone on iOS 18.4.1. Either it was enabled specifically on 18.2, and then disabled, or you enabled it manually. (Or some other weird thing, like it’s only enabled on iPhone Pros.)
That's kind of the point, Chrome shipped it across multiple platforms two years ago, while Safari still has no timeframe despite having a much narrower set of APIs and hardware to support. Firefox at least has the excuse of needing broad compatibility like Chrome but with a fraction of the development resources. Apple are just dragging their feet.
> That's kind of the point, Chrome shipped it across multiple platforms two years ago
Chrome ships a lot of things. Even now WebGPU is marked as experimental technology on MDN.
WebGPU didn't even become a Candidate Recommendation until December 2024 (half a year ago)
> Apple are just dragging their feet.
Or they are not in any rush to implement APIs that haven't reached consensus, haven't passed reviews, are subject to change etc. Chrome has very very cavalier attitude towards shipping APIs.
> Cross-platform dev is for low-rent chumps, unless it's our cross-platform dev
From an article talking about their decision to build WebGPU[1]. I was definitely being dramatic, but do think that Apple's overall vibe doesn't mesh well with open standards.
Why the vitriol?
Apple did in fact initiate and co-create the WebGPU standard [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebGPU
Edit to include quote of parent comment.