Microsoft working on unified app store for phone and desktop

It’s not entirely clear why this wasn’t Microsoft’s strategy from the start, but a report from The Vergetoday suggests that the company is working to build a unified app store that works consistently across Windows Phone and the Windows desktop.

According to the report Terry Myerson, head of the operating systems group at Microsoft made the announcement at an internal company meeting today.

Myerson went on to tell the company that the unified app store experience would be built into the “next releases” of Windows 8 and Windows Phone. This would mean that the planned Windows Phone 8.1 update that is due early next year would likely ship with the store and the report says a special update will be pushed to Windows 8.1 customers on the desktop to get them in line.

It’s not clear if this means that phone apps will be able to run on the PC as well as the ability to run desktop apps on mobile but it could well mean that Microsoft has big plans to make it even more simple to write code once for both phone and desktop.