By Dan Moren
November 5, 2015 7:05 AM PT
Apple TV’s App Store adds Top Charts, Categories
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Good news, Apple TV owners: you can now move past looking at featured apps or slowly searching based on app names. In the past couple days, Apple’s added both Top Charts and Categories to the Apple TV’s App Store, bringing it more in line with its counterparts on iOS and the Mac.1
Which isn’t to say that the Apple TV’s App Store couldn’t use a little more work. Right now, Categories offers an almost Henry-Fordesque level of simplicity: you can have whichever category of app you want, as long as it’s “Games” or “Entertainment.” (Are all apps that aren’t games entertaining? And aren’t games themselves entertainment? Oh, the humanity!)
Granted, those are likely to be the two most popular categories of apps on the Apple TV. But it also means that a lot of potentially interesting apps are falling through the cracks. Fortunately, it’s not hard for Apple to add more categories in the future—the web-based nature of the App Store means that they can roll them out without having to issue a software update. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few more categories spring up in the near future.
Meanwhile, it would be great if Apple also expanded Siri’s capabilities to let the virtual assistant search the App Store for you. At least then we’d have one more place where you wouldn’t have to use the frustrating onscreen keyboard.
- Insert pithy comment about how it may have already surpassed the Mac App Store here. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Twitter at @dmoren or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. The latest novel in his Galactic Cold War series of sci-fi space adventures, The Nova Incident, is available now.]
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