Why doesn't the Apple Vision Pro simulator appear as a run destination?

Throughout the WWDC guides and videos, Apple claims existing iOS and iPadOS apps will run in the visionOS Pro Simulator "unmodified." But none of my existing UIKit apps do.

xrOS is installed and it does run for new project templates. But even after making sure "Apple Vision (Designed for iPad)" is added to my project settings, the destination never appears in the picker UI.

What is Xcode detecting? If existing apps must be using SwiftUI or somesuch, then Apple needs to state that as a requirement.

And if that is the case, is there a migration example of meeting this requirement without breaking or rewriting my apps?

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Even a brand new SwiftUI app project, created from the template, will not show Vision Pro as a run destination. So far, I can only get new apps created via the visionOS template to run in that simulator. Is that because lines of code like this are required? And how is Xcode determining this if it's not only via project settings or info.plist keys?


@main
struct visionOS_TestApp: App {
    var body: some Scene {
        WindowGroup {
            ContentView()
        }

        ImmersiveSpace(id: "ImmersiveSpace") {
            ImmersiveView()
        }
    }
}

I was wondering the same when trying to run my Unity-based iOS app on the Vision Pro Simulator. Did you find out when Xcode actually shows it as a run destination?

Have you added Vision as a run destination of your App's product? This is done automatically for new projects, but you'll need to add "Apple Vision - Designed for iPad" if you want to run your app in compatibility mode on a preexisting codebase.

I'm experiencing the same problem. I just installed the visionOS 1 beta 4 via the Terminal (using the "xcrun simctl runtime add <path to visionOS.dmg>" command).

That resulted in the visionOS 1.0 Simulator appearing in the list of available platforms in Xcode 15's Settings window.

But when I try to add a new target to an existing project, or even create a new project, there is no visionOS option in the template chooser that appears. I have quit and relaunched Xcode a few times, but that has not helped. Is there something else I need to be doing?

  • Hello, I have exactly the same issue, did you find any solution for this? I reinstalled Xcode 15 several times but nothing was fixed, still, there is no visionsOS template and when I open the visionOS project it's shown as a macOS project with running destination macOS, even though I have visionOS SDK in the settings window.

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It it probably because you have an Intel Mac. Apple dropped support for that, although it was working in previous beta's.

Besides Apple requiring a Silicon Mac, there is also one caveat that I did not find anywhere in the documentation: You had to set the supported platform in the build settings to "visionossimulator". But this seems to have changed now, and it's just visionos. However, if you come from Unity, they still export "xros" or "xrsimulator" and also do not mention this detail anywhere in their docs. It took me ages to find this out.

I had the same issue when building from Unity (a new visionOS project from scratch in XCode worked just fine, I would recommend sanity-checking this first).

The solution that worked for me was to update the Player Settings in Unity like so: “Player > Other Settings > Configuration > Target SDK > Simulation”

If you then Build your project and open in XCode, you should see the Vision Pro simulator populate in the "Run Destinations" dropdown menu.