Google hasn’t historically done a fantastic job of highlighting Apps for specific platforms – their Tablet Apps highlight only really came into the fore in November last year, a couple of years after the introduction of tablets. Their Chromecast App highlights have similarly been lacking, with their current selection still limited to those launched ‘officially’ up till last December, and even then, those aren’t featured in Google Play. A third party developer has seen this void and created Cast Store for Chromecast to highlight Chromecast compatible apps.
The app contains a Chromecast themed news feed front and centre in the App when you first launch the App and has an easy to access list of Chromecast Apps and Games. The App has a well designed layout with a slide out menu from the left which contains quick access to Games and Apps from anywhere in the App as well as options to suggest new Chromecast compatible Apps.
The Apps and Games sections are divided into easily discernible categories. The Apps section listing 84 Chromecast compatible apps across nine categories with the most popular being Media and Video. The Gaming category is fairly basic at this stage with only 11 Chromecast games listed in three categories – Arcarde and Action, Brain & Puzzle and Casual – but hopefully this will grow as Chromecast availability expands to more countries.
It’s a great app to allow Chromecast users to discover new apps. Google did make an initial foray into including a Chromecast section in Google Play, but it appears to have fallen by the wayside since the initial release, hopefully this category makes a return soon and the need for third party apps is removed.
Oh Wow, there are quite a few apps in there…the “recently added” notification is a nice feature.