he fastest way to ship something on Vision Pro that feels wrong is to take an iPad layout, drop it in a floating window, and call it done. It'll compile. It'll even look reasonable in a screenshot. Then someone actually wears the headset, and the flat rectangle full of dense list items sitting in physical space just feels like a monitor that followed you home — because it is one. Nothing about the interface acknowledges that it now has depth to work with, or that the user's whole living room is part of the canvas.
visionOSgivesyouthreefundamentallydifferentcontainers,andreachingforthewrongoneisthemostcommonmistakewesee.
Windows
A window is the closest thing to familiar ground — flat SwiftUI content floating in space, and mostly the right call for anything text- or list-heavy: settings, a document, an inbox. The mistake isn't using a window, it's stopping there for everything. Windows are the default because they're the least effort to build, not because they're the best fit for every screen in the app.
Volumes
A volume gives content actual three-dimensional bounds — you can walk around it. This is where a lot of apps quietly fail: they put a 3D model in a volume and never ask what the user gains from walking around it that they didn't already have from rotating it with a drag gesture in a window. A volume earns its cost when depth adds information — an architectural model, a product you're actually inspecting — not when it's used because volumes feel more 'spatial.'
Immersive spaces
Full immersion replaces the user's surroundings, partially or entirely. It's the most powerful container and the easiest to misuse, because taking over someone's entire visual field is a big ask for a feature that doesn't need it. We treat immersive space as something the user opts into for a specific reason — a fully spatial experience the app is actually about — not a wrapper around content that would work fine in a window.
The actual rule
Pick the container based on what the content needs, not on what looks most impressive in a keynote. Most of an app's screens are still windows. That's not a failure to use the platform — using restraint on a platform this new is usually the harder, better decision.