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.
