Microsoft has made significant progress with the new Category layout for the All Apps view in Windows 11. The Start menu now has working groups with icons. The app sorting has been optimized: The Start menu creates groups more carefully, and they now match all categories available in the Store. The app icons in groups tiles have got hints that show the app name (but there are still no labels).
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Starting in Windows 11 Build 22635.4082 (Beta), the Categories layout is getting much closer to its production stage. Microsoft has added tooltips to categories that display the names of applications when you hover over their icons. This makes them more convenient in use, as they lack of captions under the icons.
Finally, the list of categories now corresponds to the 29 categories of the Microsoft Store, these:
- Accessibility
- Medical
- Navigation & Maps
- Communication
- Health & Fitness
- Graphics
- Games
- Productivity
- Multimedia Design
- Travel
- Books & Reference
- Government & politics
- Security
- Developer Tools
- News & weather
- Personalization
- Entertainment
- Sports
- Photo & Video
- Music
- Lifestyle
- Social
- Personal Finance
- Shopping
- Utilities & Tools
- Education
- Food & dining
- Kids & Family
- Business
- Other
You can see which apps go where in the "C:\Windows\SystemApps\MicrosoftWindows.Client.Core_cw5n1h2txyewy\StartMenu\Assets\AllAppCategoryMappings.json" file.
While it is clear how the sorting works for Microsoft Store apps, there is no information on how Windows 11 is going to arrange classic desktop apps. It is hard to categorize them, and there are plenty of apps made for Windows.
As a reminder, you can enable the new view with ViVeTool.
- Download the ViVeTool utility from GitHub.
- Unzip the downloaded archive to the c:\ViVeTool folder.
- Open Windows Terminal as Administrator (Win + X > select Terminal (Admin).
- Now type the command
c:\vivetool\vivetool /enable /id:48433719,47205210,49221331and press Enter. - Finally, restart the operating system.
That is how you enable the new All Apps view arranged by categories.
To undo the change, run the following command again as Administrator, and restart Windows 11:
c:\vivetool\vivetool /disable /id:47205210,49221331
That's it.
Thanks to @PhantomOfEarth for sharing their findings.
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PLEASE, MS let us make custom categories. Some of us like to group apps by project, work/personal, etc.