Patch My PC Ideas & Feedback
A community where customers and the community can provide feedback to make a better product for everyone! For more details on how we prioritize requests, please see:
A community where customers and the community can provide feedback to make a better product for everyone! For more details on how we prioritize requests, please see:
Summary
Add an optional feature in the Home Updater settings that allows users to group applications by category in the App Library tab.
Details
Current State:
Right now, users can filter apps by category, but all apps are still displayed in a single list.
Requested Enhancement:
Add a setting (not enabled by default) called “Group applications by category” within the Settings menu.
Behavior When Enabled:
The App Library tab will display applications grouped in collapsible/expandable category sections (e.g., “Web Browsers,” “Media Tools,” etc.).
Each of the 13 categories would become a group box UI element that can be expanded or collapsed individually.
The UI should remember the expanded/collapsed state of each group when the app is closed and reopened.
Extra Notes:
This option only affects the App Library tab.
May consider hiding the category filter UI when group view is enabled, but that’s optional and needs exploration.
A simple visual mockup might help clarify how this would work in the UI.
We have a few options we are looking at for this idea, here are some of the designs if anyone has feedback:
V1: Expandable/collapsible list of categories. While this is similar to the previous version of the app, it can be a bit difficult to navigate with many apps. If multiple categories are expanded, the page can become very long. To improve usability, we could add an “Expand/Collapse All” option.
V2: Separate categories that link to dedicated second-level pages for each category. Users who prefer not to browse by category can still use the full application list at the bottom, as usual. Selecting a category takes the user to a focused page just for that category, without any distractions.
V3: Sidebar menu with categories — a standard menu/filter layout where clicking a category displays the corresponding apps on the same page. Users can still view the full list of apps but have the option to filter more familiarly and straightforwardly.
Additional Icon Options:
Each version can use a different approach when it comes to icons:
No Icons: Simplifies adding new categories, as there's no need to create or assign icons or colors.
Icons Without Colors: Keeps things visually clean and still avoids the need to manage a color system for each category.
Icons with Colors: Enhances category separation and provides additional visual context, making it easier for users to quickly identify and select categories.
From my experience with v4, and the categories it had, could we have more than the 13 categories that you're indicating here? Such that they may be smaller?
Some of v4's smaller categories only had 5, 10 items in them, and it greatly aided us scanning up/down the list to spot what we wanted to tick. With the larger lists, it takes more effort to read every item.
And for us that use it a lot, it makes it nice and fast as we're kinda using pattern recognition, muscle memory, when we revisit the categories over and over.
In v4, most categories were ok. But 'Utilities' was enormous (almost 70!). It was noticeably more difficult to scan down, and easier to miss an app we actually needed.
So could we have more categories, where it's logical?
E.g. we can have a VPN category nowadays! But also say, cloud storage, disk utilities, Image viewers/editors, video players, audio players, remote access, pdf apps, debloating tools, etc. etc. etc. Something like these. Users would have almost zero problem knowing exactly which category to open to find the apps they need.
With the massively expanded apps list, it's quite easy to find good number of apps to fill even a laser focused category, avoiding the need for 'catch-all' categories like 'Utilities' was.
Categories also help with app 'discovery', So we can check out, say a different PDF reader, but don't recognise many of the other apps' names. And there are many apps in your list that give zero indication of their purpose. So it'll help a lot just knowing their category.
Thank you.