Apple Vision Pro has struggled to gain a foothold in the market thanks to its sky-high $3,499 price tag, but it looks like iPhone users without that kind of budget could soon get a taste of an element of that -this.
On his Front Page Tech YouTube ChannelJon Prosser has revealed a supposed redesign of the iOS 19 camera app, and it “reflects the design philosophy of visionOS.”
Prosser did not include video of what he actually saw, for fear of causing problems for his inside source. Instead, the channel recreated it as animated renderings, so you can judge for yourself.
The new interface includes translucent menus for camera controls, leaving room for a larger viewfinder. At the bottom of the screen are two options – camera and video – and tapping each brings up options for different settings, such as aspect ratio, depth, styles, exposure, timers and more. The resolution and frame rate settings, meanwhile, are hidden at the top of the screen.
For comparison, you can see the Vision Pro interface in our video below.
You may be feeling a sense of deja vu at this point, as a similar camera app leak last April pointed to a Vision Pro-like redesign for iOS 18. That makes us think the rumor was not wrong last time, just delayed for the next OS version for some reason.
A redesign beyond the camera?
While streamlining the camera app itself is certainly promising, it’s what this suggests for the direction of iOS itself that’s most exciting.
If the camera app gets a Vision Pro-style overhaul, could that mean the rest of iOS 19 will too? Prosser tries to imagine what it might look like with the following rendering, filled with circular icons.
“This would easily be the biggest and most significant redesign since iOS 7,” Prosser says.
But there is another option that he says is more likely. “Instead, maybe the VisionOS UI elements exist more around iOS itself,” he says. “In other words, the main apps: like the camera app, like the Music app, the Notes app, the Wallet app, etc.
“I realize that this is perhaps the most disappointing option I could have offered you, but if you are asking my opinion – which you are not – my opinion is that it is the “option which I lean more towards for… reasons.”
He doesn’t specify what these “reasons” are, but it makes sense. If the main barrier to Vision Pro adoption was lack of familiarity, it would make sense to quickly unify the user interface across devices. But it’s clear that the $3,499 price is the problem, one that Apple could fix with a cheaper version down the road.
More importantly, more than half of smartphones in North America run iOS. It’s familiar to millions of people, and many of them will stick with the iPhone simply because they know where everything is and how to get the most out of it as is.
This may seem silly to tech enthusiasts who appreciate design changes and new features, but this familiarity is actually a big selling point for many people. Abandoning something so familiar for something that hasn’t yet been tested would be a huge and unnecessary gamble.
If Apple really thinks the Vision OS method is better, then it would make more sense to phase it in over multiple iOS updates. In other words, this could be the first step towards a complete overhaul rather than changing everything at once.
We should find out what Apple has in mind in about six months, when the iOS 19 beta becomes available to developers. For those who don’t want to bother with potentially unstable early software, a full release will likely be coming alongside the iPhone 17 in September.
