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Windows Phone and Windows app stores to merge in spring

by Mark Tyson on 27 September 2013, 09:45

Tags: Windows 8, Windows Phone

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Microsoft plans to merge the Windows Phone Store and the Windows Store into a single app store for all its platforms. The transition may complete as early as spring 2014. Sources speaking to The Verge, who attended a meeting with Terry Myerson, head of the operating systems group, say the new combined app store will work with 8.1 versions of Microsoft’s mobile and desktop/tablet OSes.

The internal Microsoft meeting discussing the merge, attended by The Verge’s sources, took place yesterday at KeyArena in Seattle. Reports say that “about 13,000 employees” were there. However details about the execution of this merger plan are very thin on the ground right now, which leaves lots of questions unanswered.

It is expected that the unified Windows store will work like Apple’s App Store where sometimes phone apps can scale to bigger screens but some specialised tablet apps aren’t available for the small screen equipped smartphones. Windows Modern UI screen splitting ‘Snap View’ might work slickly with multiple smartphone apps on a larger screen.

The Seattle Times received a statement from Microsoft, following a question about the consolidation of the stores, which read “As we’ve said before, one benefit of Windows Phone 8 sharing a common core with Windows 8 is that developers now have the ability to use much of the same code to deliver apps and games on both Windows 8.1 and Windows Phone 8 devices. Beyond that, we have nothing more to share.”

Windows Phone and Windows RT to be combined?

Last week Myerson spoke at Microsoft’s Financial Analysts Meeting and talked through strategy. A lot of what he said should have made the newly leaked Windows Store merger decision obvious, apart from the timing of the change. “We've brought all the OS groups together at the company,” Myerson said, “and have organized all of our efforts in the operating system area around three key beliefs. The first is that we really should have one silicon interface for all of our devices, one set of developer APIs on all of our devices, and all of the apps we bring to end users should be available on all of our devices.” WinSuperSite concluded from this, and other strategic discussions, that Windows RT will be used as the foundation of the new Windows Phone 8.1.



HEXUS Forums :: 5 Comments

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Microsoft seems to be shifting their attention more and more towards the mobile market. With Steam OS arriving soon and Linux gaming starting to gain some traction, I wonder if Microsoft is going to start losing their market in the desktop PC world.
If games start appearing more and more often to Steam OS/Linux, I'm not sure what reason do I have to still hang on to Windows. Win 8 is already a horrible experience on a desktop PC, if you don't modify it so that you don't need the crappy Metro UI and those screen edge gestures that are horrible to use with a mouse and on a multi-screen PC.
With all this stuff happening, we might be on a brink of a PC revolution. If the gaming industry gets fed up with Microsoft and starts focusing more on Linux, Microsoft might be in trouble. They might think they are too big to fail, but look at what happened to Nokia. It only takes one innovative product to bring down an industry giant.
Anyone ever bought anything on it?
I have a Lumia 620, so I have bought a couple of games and a few apps for it through the Windows Phone store.
Yes and windows phone are good. they just work.
wonder how they'll stop confusion between the two.

Hope they arent going to make all windows phone 8 devices incompatible with all this future stuff like they did for windows phone 7