Apple's new HomeView hub ships with just 15 built-in apps, but it can borrow a handful more from your iPhone's CarPlay lineup.
Apple's tech specs page for HomeView lists the native apps that come with the device, covering the basics: Calendar, FaceTime, Home, Intercom, Messages, Music, Podcasts, Reminders, Safari, Settings, Timers, Weather, World Clock, Find My, and Alarms. There is no App Store, so that list is the whole menu. The specs page also notes that HomeView can display certain CarPlay-enabled audio and video apps streamed from a paired iPhone. Apple names four of its own apps that work this way: Apple Music Classical, Apple News, Apple TV, and Audiobooks. WIRED reports that third-party apps, including Spotify, work too, and the latest Apple Developer Program agreement confirms that some CarPlay apps and widgets are now built to run on HomeView.
A HomeView without an App Store looked like a closed box. Routing CarPlay apps onto it is a workaround that stretches an existing platform instead of building a new one from scratch. It also means a smart display's feature set can grow or shrink based on what happens to CarPlay, a platform Apple already treats as a second-class citizen compared to iOS.
Call it App Store absence by other means: borrow the car's software, skip the storefront.