For those of us living in the Apple ecosystem, the App Store is second nature. It’s a core part of the Apple experience and the go-to spot for any applications you might want for your device. So I was fairly shocked to learn that up until today, the link apps.apple.com would send you to a page with information about the App Store, but not actually take you to said digital storefront.

That’s right, it took until the year 2025 for Apple to create a browser version of the App Store.

Maybe it never seemed necessary since the App Store is pre-loaded on any Apple device. I don’t foresee many edge cases where I’d want to look in a browser rather than actually use the App Store on one of my machines, although I’m sure now that I’ve said so, I’ll wind up doing exactly that within a week. But still, the first App Store debuted 17 years ago. Which, particularly in tech years, is a really, really long time.

In any case, the browser App Store lets you pick your hardware platform from a dropdown on the far left, so you can peruse software for different platforms wherever you’re on the web. There’s also a search field as well as a list of app categories that you can sift through. All the stuff you’d expect from the actual App Store, just in a browser. Entries for specific applications will prompt you to open the listing in the device’s App Store where the button would normally let you buy the software. Which leaves me once again surprised this took so long to create and also questioning who will actually use it.