Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Andrew Cunningham

Update: A few hours after going live, the simple "App Store" tab shown in the screenshots above was silently updated with featured categories and a search function like the ones in the regular App Store. We've added another shot showing what the store currently looks like.

Original story: Look at the release notes for some recent iOS app updates, and you'll see that developers have quietly been adding Apple Watch support for a couple of weeks now. Today, Apple is officially taking the wraps off the Apple Watch arm of the App Store, and it's now accessible through the Apple Watch app on iPhones 5, 5C, 5S, 6, and 6 Plus running iOS 8.2 or 8.3. According to The Wall Street Journal, the store contains "more than 3,000" watch apps for early adopters to download, and many of those are from major players like Instagram, Twitter, Uber, The New York Times, Evernote, Wunderlist, and a variety of other media outlets and businesses.

If you launch the Apple Watch app and go to the App Store tab, it presents you with a long list of major apps but, oddly, no apparent search function or any kind of organization. The apps are represented by their round Apple Watch icons, and if you tap them, you'll be able to see screenshots of the watch app above screenshots of the iPhone app. Remember, at this point all watch apps are contained within iPhone apps, and you install these apps to your phone rather than directly on your watch. The iPhone then takes care of the rest of the syncing.

In the standard App Store, apps pick up a small round badge that tells you the app offers extra Apple Watch functionality. The iPhone screenshots are shown first, but the Apple Watch screenshots are shown below. At this point, searching through the main App Store is the best way to discover Apple Watch apps that aren't on Apple's list.

Some Apple Watch hardware orders will begin arriving as early as tomorrow, though most customers will be affected by long wait times that stretch into May and June.