As we’ve previously covered, Microsoft is working on another redesign of the Start Menu in Windows 11, and one of the new features is that apps will be divided into different categories automatically.
According to Windows Latest, Microsoft has created a 15 megabyte JSON file with information about which apps should end up in which category. That’s right—pretty much every app on the Microsoft Store has been assigned a number, with 0 indicating Productivity apps, 1 indicating Social apps, 2 indicating Creative apps, and so on.
As soon as you have at least three apps that belong to the same category, they will automatically be grouped together in the new Start Menu. The ranking of the apps will depend on how often you use them, so the apps in a category won’t be sorted in an alphabetical order.
At the moment, it doesn’t look like Microsoft is going to give us the option to rename categories or add our own, so we’ll just have to accept the company’s categorization method… for better or worse.