The days of endlessly scouring the internet for the perfect app to add to your community are a thing of the past: the App Directory is now rolling out on Discord!
Whether it’s moderation support, a new game to play, or a tool that helps you look things up without leaving chat, tons of community-made applications made by the developer community will be searchable within Discord. Browse, explore, and discover your new favorite apps, directly within your server’s menu.
To start discovering and adding your next favorite apps, head into Server Settings > App Directory, or check it out here. On the homepage, you’ll see a wide selection of Discord applications that enhance your server in fun, formal and sometimes silly ways.
Apps can do an incredible amount of things — from supporting the moderation of your community, to providing fun games to play and new ways to interact with your friends, and even tossing in a good pun if someone says a particular word or phrase. Add to your community what makes sense for your needs, or try out something fun!
Not sure what app makes sense for your server? Browse the entire selection of applications at once, or explore curated collections for running growing communities, learning something new or ways to express yourself. You can even fine-tune your choice by searching through every available application in the App Directory, letting that hidden gem pop up immediately.
As part of the ever-growing sea of community-made apps, you’ll be able to discover brand new apps from familiar faces. Spend hours creating AI-generated artwork from any prompt you can /imagine, such as “shoebill driving a sportscar” using Midjourney, or use Picsart's AI tools to /cartoonify an existing photo of your friends and easily create stickers with /sticker_maker.
If you’re more into fast cars than bird cars, you won’t want to miss the NASCAR Bot. Use /driver or /vehicle to get recent stats, or /playbyplay to get live updates directly in your channel. Go from watching winners to being a winner as OP.GG lets you know tons of info for your favorite competitive games, and afterwards use the Wendy's bot to get a good roast in (naturally — it's Wendy's).
And obviously when you’re winning your gaming matches, you’ll need some action music: The SoundCloud app lets you discover and play original music from independent artists directly in Voice. Finally, get some knowledge in that noggin of yours with Magoosh for test prep and leaderboards, Step for finance tips, games and the stock prices, and test your nostalgic Nickelodeon know-how to earn yourself some much-coveted digital slime.
These and apps from the likes of StockX, Netflix and plenty more are available to add to your server in the App Directory.
Once you’ve found the perfect app to add, just hit “Add to Server,” accept any permissions the app needs, and you’re good to go. (You should definitely read over those required permissions so you know what the app will be able to do in your server. Every app is different!)
From here, it all depends on how the app itself works. Some might require you to do some additional setup once they’ve joined, but other apps might be good to go the moment they join your community. Additionally, certain apps may offer commands specifically for Admins and Moderators, so be sure to tailor them to your server and structure as needed.
Any server member with the “Manage Server” permission can add apps to your server. This permission is generally saved for server moderators and admins, ‘cause, ya’know… they manage the server every day.
If you’re not sure which moderators (or users) on your team have this, it might be a good time to re-review the permissions the roles on your server has. Take a peek at our Setting Up Permissions FAQ if you’re unsure where to start.
The apps living in the App Directory are crafted with love by the Discord Developer community — you’ll feel confident knowing the application you’re adding to directly supports the efforts of the ever-growing developer community on the platform. New apps are being added regularly as developers allow their apps to be discovered, so keep an eye out for that next rad app to level up your server.
Before the days of Slash Commands, it was a guessing game to see who could do what with your newest app: Each application had its own commands and ways to set them up, making it a guessing game of “!settings,” “?settings”, “.settings” or just yelling at the bot until it responded.
This year we’ve added more details to the Server Settings > Integrations page for managing who can use which application commands, available directly within Discord. This makes it easy to understand who has access to which commands, where your server members can use them at, and what commands are available.
Developers can decide what they want the default permissions for each command of their app to be, and Admins and Moderators can easily make customizations to optimize for safety and engagement within their community.
For the lowdown on how permissions for Slash Commands work, you can check out our guide here.
Starting today, admins and moderators around the globe will be able to easily add an application to their communities, without ever leaving Discord. But it wasn’t just the Directory alone that made all it happen.
The apps within the App Directory were crafted by our incredible Discord Developer community — so this last message is for you, the rad dev community: it’s your commitment and passion to making the platform a better place for everyone, and helping millions of people shape their communities into places they can call their home… and you, the developer community, help make it a reality.
Haven’t considered Discord app development before? There’s always a space for you! If you or someone you know is an aspiring app-maker, check out the Discord Developer Portal to get started. Once your app is ready to be shared with the world, learn how to enable discovery of your app for inclusion in the App Directory here.
The power is in your hands! Let’s make Discord a bot-ter place. 🤖
