App Store

MaiPai Home comes with a lot of apps and tools: Chat, Maps, Images, News, Weather, Recipes, and more. The App Store is where the household admin decides which of them are turned on for everyone, and where anyone in the family can ask for something new.

Browsing the store

Open the App Store to see everything available, grouped the same way the rest of the app groups things: Watch & Listen, Read, Create, Around the House, and Everyday. Each app has its own page with a short description, the kind of thing you can ask it to do, and whether it stays fully on your hardware or reaches out to an online service.

You will see two kinds of things:

• Apps have their own page you can open, like Maps or Recipes.
• Extensions are chat-only helpers. They do not have a page; instead, your companion can use them while you talk.

Apps that are built in, like Chat and Images, are always available and cannot be removed.

Installing an app (admin)

If you are the household admin, every app you have not turned on yet shows a Get button. Tapping it opens a quick disclosure first:

• If the app is fully local, it tells you so. Nothing leaves your network.
• If the app connects to an online service, it lists each service and what it is used for, so you can decide before turning it on.

Confirm, and the app is installed for the whole household right away. To remove an app later, open its menu and choose Remove. It disappears from everyone’s home screen, navigation, and search until you turn it back on.

There is no separate “agree to data collection” step anymore. The disclosure you see at install time is the whole story: it shows exactly which outside services, if any, the app will talk to.

Requesting an app (everyone else)

If you are not the admin, apps you cannot turn on yourself show a Request button instead. Tap it, add an optional note for your admin, and send. Your admin gets a notification and can approve it with one tap. Once they do, the app shows up for you automatically.

Notifications

A small badge on your profile shows when you have something new. Open it to see your notifications and mark them as read.

Admins get a little more here: install requests from other family members land in the admin notifications and in the App Store’s requests list, ready to approve or dismiss. Regular family members only ever see their own notifications, never anyone else’s requests.

Your home, your layout

The home screen is yours to arrange. You can add and rearrange the widgets you care about, like weather, sports, jokes, and your favorite apps, by dragging them into place.

Your admin can set a starting layout for the whole household, and can also lock a particular person’s layout if it should stay put. If your layout is locked, you will still see it, you just will not be able to rearrange it until the lock is lifted.