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YouTube Launches Native VisionOS App for Apple Vision Pro With Spatial Video and 8K on M5

The rollout closes a prominent content gap on Apple’s headset without resolving concerns about the platform’s depth or polish.

Overview

  • The app is live in the visionOS App Store and delivers a full signed‑in YouTube experience, including subscriptions, playlists, watch history, and comments.
  • It supports the entire YouTube catalog—standard videos, Shorts, and immersive 3D, 360, and VR180 formats—and adds a Spatial tab to help users discover spatial content.
  • Gesture interactions such as resizing windows and scrubbing are supported, and 8K playback is available only on M5-equipped Vision Pro models; the app also runs on M2 devices.
  • Before this release, Vision Pro users relied on Safari or briefly on third‑party players like Juno, which was removed in 2024 for violating YouTube’s policies.
  • Early hands‑on reports describe a basic implementation with omissions like no theater mode for 2D videos and a nonfunctional Shorts tab for some users, and they note that major holdouts like Netflix still lack native apps.