Developers are starting to create games and applications in preparation for the Windows Phone 7 launch at the end of the year. Some applications that I am creating would appear in an Education category if Marketplace had such a category.  The App Store has an Education category.  So I thought I would do a quick comparison of the categories available in each location.

At first it appeared that Marketplace was missing four more categories than it was because of its use of nested categories.  It turns out that Marketplace is more fine-grained when it comes to Business and it has a Communication category that App Store doesn’t.  But Marketplace is missing categories for Education and Medical.  I think it is a huge oversight to not have a top-level Education category in Marketplace.

Now let’s compare the Games categories between the two stores:

It is surprising to see that App Store has 5 more categories than Marketplace with Classic being the only category that Marketplace has that App Store doesn’t.

I suspect that as more applications are developed for (or ported to) the Windows Phone 7 that developers will be asking Microsoft to add categories to Marketplace.