Microsoft axes pre-Mango holdouts and Zune desktop software from WP7 app purchases

The Windows Phone team over at Microsoft is making a few changes to the ways users are able to acquire apps on their devices but thank heavens, they most likely won't have any effect on most of you.

From today onwards, users can no longer get apps from the Zune desktop software (the app store will remain in service for the Zune HD, as seen in the picture above), so they'll need to browse the website for apps or directly on their phones, which Microsoft says the majority of users were already doing anyway.

The second change is that in the next few weeks, any users who haven’t upgraded their handsets to Windows Phone 7.5 Mango will no longer be able to download, update or review apps.
But since the update is readily available for all Windows Phones (Android, we're mostly talking about you) this shouldn't be too much of a hassle, and any procrastinators or people out-of-the-loop will regain access to the soon to be droves of apps, once they have upgraded.

And finally, the developer blog mentions the software needed for hardware partners to create phones for Vietnam, Israel, Iraq, Kazakhstan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, UAE and and Bahrain that there will be more news on these storefronts "in the coming weeks."
With these moves, the squad has gotten rid of any reason to open a heavy memory hungry desktop program just to install some new apps from a PC (iTunes, we're talking about you) and developers can write off supporting users still running on old platforms without any guilt to go with it.

Yeah, they did all that in one day!