With Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 we’ve seen Microsoft’s two versions of Windows come closer together than ever before, thanks to a shared NT core. One area where unification has yet to be seen is in their app marketplaces.

At the moment there is the Windows Store for Windows RT and Windows 8 apps and the Windows Phone Store for Windows Phone 8. Luckily these two things might be coming together in the not-to-distant future, as hinted by a new job posting.

As reported first by WMPowerUser, Microsoft’s job listing called for a software development engineer to help bring development platforms for Windows store and Windows Phone store close together. The listing has since been removed by the listing asked this question:

“Do you wish the code you write for Windows Store apps would just work on the Windows Phone and vice versa?”

As far as responsibilities for the job, the listing says that the position would focus on solving technical challenges involved with bringing a platform built for desktop/tablets to the phone form factor.

In other words, there may soon come a time when you can download Windows 8/RT apps for your phone, and visa versa– somewhat similarly to what you can do right now with Android and iOS. Do you think that bringing these ecosystems together under one roof is a good idea, or do you like that Microsoft keeps them separate in their current form?

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Perhaps users of Windows Phone devices don’t understand that the “marketplace” is where you go to buy apps? For some inexplicable reason, Microsoft is appearing going through the process of rebranding its Windows Phone Marketplace into Windows Phone Store. I guess this is falling in line with what Google did too, shifting from an Android Market to a Google Play Store too.

It’s also possible that this is simply Microsoft’s latest attempt to bring everything under the same over-arching umbrella, which is fundamentally the same thing that they’ve started doing with certain Xbox, Zune and Windows-branded offerings. After all, there is a “Windows Store” that’ll come along with Windows 8… but this is still the Windows Phone Store, so it’s not like the two are intricately intertwined either.

At this point, Microsoft is neither confirming nor denying the name change, but the “Windows Phone Store” naming scheme has started to appear in a few places, like on the Windows Phone Dev Center where it says you can “create great apps and add them to the Windows Phone Store for the world to see, try, and buy.”

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