Wii U Homebrew App Store – find and install apps the easy way

Modding your WiiU opens you up to the whole world of Homebrew. Not only can you play all your WiiU, Wii and GameCube games from legally obtained backup files, but you can install and run Homebrew applications that expand the features of your console way beyond what it was designed for.

If you haven’t yet modded your WiiU I highly recommend that you do. It’s easy to do and will breathe a fresh lease of life back into your old console. Check out my modding tutorial using ModMii and I’ll link to this in the description.

But finding and installing these homebrew applications can be a bit tedious, having to use your computer to download files to your SD card and then porting them over to your console.

But there is an easier way with the Homebrew App Store.

So, let’s install this and see what it has for us.

Installing the App

The Store app needs to be installed like any other application.

We first need to use our computer to visit the main website at

https://hb-app.store/

The installation files are found on the About page link in the top right of the page.

Scroll down to the How It Works section and click on the link for the native Homebrew App Store. This will take you to this GitHub repository

https://github.com/fortheusers/hb-appstore

This main page contains some information about the app, but we need to head over to the releases section to get the files we need. Scroll down to the assets section and download the wiiu-extracttosd.zip file.

Once that’s downloaded we need to extract the files from the archive. You should get a set of files and folders that looks like this. We now need to put our WiiU SD card into the computer and then copy everything over to the root of the SD card. This will basically place the App Store files into an Appstore folder in the wiiu apps directory, ready for installation on the console.

Once the files are copied over eject the SD card and put it back into the WiiU.

Power on the console and you should see the Homebrew App Store icon on your WiiU menu page. Remember it might be placed on one of the other pages.

Selecting the app will open up the store so you can start to browse the applications.

Installing and Updating Apps

As you look through you can select any app to get more details about it. On this details page you’ll also see a download link which will instantly download and install the app to your SD card. If the app needs updating you can also update from here in the same way, and this includes any apps that you’ve installed manually.

So have a good look around. You’ll find homebrew games, system tools, RetroArch so you can emulate retro games consoles and Aroma plugins to name just a few.