Windows Phone Marketplace gets updated categories

By Daniel Rubino
last updated

Here's a cool little update: Microsoft has pushed out, seemingly in addition to the AppHub features, changes in categories to the Marketplace for Windows Phone.

Simply launch your Marketplace and head to Apps. You'll see a few changes including replacing "and" with "+" signs, making things surprisingly easier to read. In addition, we now have a dedicated "Books" and "Business" category (we're not too sure if the latter is new).

We bet this has something to do with the AppHub's "private beta market" launching tonight as well as MS just wanting to further divvy up their 26K apps they have available. Let us know if you find any other little changes that we missed in comments!

Edit: Games too, have new, more detailed categoreis as well, including things like "shooter" "classics", "strategy + simulation", etc. Very nice.

(Thanks, Tahiti Bob, for the heads up!)

Daniel Rubino
Daniel Rubino
Editor-in-chief

Daniel Rubino is the Editor-in-chief of Windows Central, head reviewer, podcast co-host, and analyst. He has been covering Microsoft since 2007 when this site was called WMExperts (and later Windows Phone Central). His interests include Windows, laptops, next-gen computing, and for some reason, watches. Before all this tech stuff, he worked on a Ph.D. in linguistics, watched people sleep (for medical purposes!), and ran the projectors at movie theaters because it was fun.

7 Comments
  • hm in the german marketplace there are some spelling errors. but the categories in the games section are nice.but we have & instead of +
  • What spelling errors exist? Are they small ones?
  • Daniel the app pages look alot better now using the pivot control aswell.
  • Here in Spain we have "y" (and) instead of +No spelling errors.
  • @Coolaaron88 they changed nachrichten & weather (news and weather) to nachrichten && weatherBut the german version is riddled with errors. No wonder I changed it to english for the phone. PS: do the phone specifig marketplaces for anyone? The LG one hasn't worked since I updated to Mango. I can still search for the apps but the shortcut to all apps gives me an error.
  • I'm assuming that the image for this article is of a mango build? I don't have a search magnifying glass in my marketplace.
  • Yes it's Mango