Apple adds new Categories section to the Apple TV App Store
Good news for Apple TV owners looking for better ways to discover new apps on the App Store. After adding Top Charts, Apple has added a new Categories section to the App Store as well. As of now, the Categories section appears …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Apple TV App Store is barely weeks old, and Apple is assembling its discovery layer piece by piece: the Top Charts section landed just two days before this Categories addition, both aimed at the same problem — helping owners find apps on a remote-driven interface with no search history or web-style navigation to lean on.
The stakes show up in the early numbers: within a month the store held 2,624 apps, with games alone accounting for 1,002. Charts dominated by one category leave everything else effectively invisible, which is precisely the gap a Categories browse surface addresses.
First-order effects
- Non-game developers gain their first realistic path to visibility — under Top Charts, apps outside the dominant games category were competing for a handful of slots; category shelves restore shelf space by genre.
- Apple TV owners browsing the store shift from a single popularity-ranked view to genre-based exploration, reducing dependence on what is already trending.
Second-order effects
- If games keep absorbing the majority of the catalog — 1,002 of 2,624 apps at the one-month mark — category depth itself becomes a signal developers watch when choosing whether to port apps to tvOS at all.
- Third-party apps on the platform are already adopting the same organizing logic: Facebook's Apple TV video app splits content into Recommended, Shared by Friends, and similar buckets rather than a flat list.
Third-order effects
- The incremental build-out — charts first, then categories, echoing how Apple later added a browse tab to Apple News — points toward every Apple storefront converging on the same discovery scaffold: charts plus curated sections plus search, regardless of platform.
- As tvOS matured into the sidebar-unified experience of the 2023 redesign, discovery surfaces like these became the raw material that larger navigation overhauls reorganize — meaning early choices about categorization shape how the whole storefront evolves.
The trend: Apple is rolling out its proven iOS App Store discovery machinery — charts, categories, editorial — onto newer platforms piece by piece, making curation infrastructure the default template for every storefront it operates.