We get it – application stores are cool. With the two biggest games in town, Apple Inc.’s App Store and Google Inc.’s Android’s Market both running in to several hundred thousand apps and making developers millions of dollars, it only seems natural that others would want to irk the successful formula. However the recent bout of app store-mania seems to be showing no signs of stopping. Today, leaked screenshots appear to show that Microsoft Corp. is jumping on the app store bandwagon, and including their take on Apple’s money-printing model in the upcoming Windows 8.
We’ve now officially lost count of how many app stores are floating around out there, but with Amazon.com Inc.’s recent release of their Android Appstore and rumours of a Barnes & Noble Nook outlet on the horizon, we think this puts the total at somewhere around a million.
Today’s revelations go some way towards explaining why Microsoft is trying to pry the “App Store” trademark away from Apple, who, for their part, are doing all they can to protect it – recently suing Amazon.com for using the truncated “appstore.”
The leaked screenshot shows a number of Microsoft products nestled in the store, including Office and Security Essentials, along with the popular Opera browser, and that veteran of many app stores, “Angry Birds.” According to the leaker the Windows App Store has already passed a round of internal testing and is ready for a public beta, so we could hear more about this very shortly. Even if Microsoft foregoes public testing, with Windows 8 scheduled for a release next year, you won’t have to wait long for yet another place to unload those burdensome credit card details.
Via cnBeta (Translated)
