Arcade & App Store
We built our own App Store to house everything we make
The Arcade started as a home for our quick, exploratory web game prototypes — scrappy ideas our designers build to iterate fast and see a concept playable in the browser. Then it outgrew games, so we built the whole storefront: our own App Store at sprlbs.com/apps, with Discover, Games, Lifestyle and Kids, feature cards for what we want people to try first, and one tap to either play instantly in the browser or get the native app on iOS.
“If nobody is going to build the right shelf for our work, we’ll build the store ourselves.”
We build these prototypes fast, as a way to test game ideas and sharpen our craft without the overhead of a native build. Each one used to be findable only through a link buried in the previous game’s drawer, and our iOS apps lived somewhere else entirely — scattered across product pages and Apple’s listings. Rather than keep pointing people at five different places, we built the shelf ourselves. Everything Super Labs makes now sits in one storefront we own end to end: we pick the categories, write the feature cards, choose what gets promoted, and ship a new title the moment it’s ready — no review queue, no waiting. Web games open instantly with nothing to download, native apps hand off to Apple when you tap Get, unreleased work lives behind a Beta tab, and the Arcade is still in there — it’s the games aisle of a bigger store.
Owning the storefront mattered more than we expected. Once every app and game shared one set of tiles, categories and cards, the loose ends showed up immediately — icons that didn’t hold up at small sizes, taglines that said nothing, prototypes we’d never actually finished. Designing the store forced us to raise the bar on the things inside it.