More Evidence for Apple TV Apps?

Last week, we presented our belief that the new iOS-based Apple TV was designed to eventually accept third-party apps from its own App Store. Steve Jobs even suggested that Apple was poised to launch an Apple TV App Store when the time was right.

The launch of Apple TV-specific apps would make some sense as Apple continues to find itself competing against Google. Google's recently-announced Google TV offers developers an opportunity to deploy their own applications to that device. We don't expect the Apple TV App Store to allow customers to run existing iOS apps on the device, but instead to open the door to Apple TV-specific apps.

Adding a bit to the evidence is a LinkedIn profile showing a recent Apple intern describing their summer position as an "Apple TV Apps Engineer". While this could represent work on the built-in Apple-supplied functionality, the internal view that the Apple TV is simply a collection of apps seems to be in line with future third-party expansion.