Windows Phone 7 hits 25,000 applications

By Tom Warren, on 1st Jul 11 9:11 am with 26 Comments

25,000 Windows Phone 7 apps

Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace has now reached 25,000 applications.

Marketplace trackers windowsphoneapplist.com is currently tracking 25,015 apps in the U.S. Marketplace alone. WP7applist is tracking 24,784 applications worldwide and explains 4,025 of them are inactive, 51% are available for free and the average price is $1.48 per paid application. Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace is growing at an impressive rate. The software giant added 3,000 applications in April alone after reaching its 12,000 milestone in late March. The Marketplace passed 15,000 apps in April just in time for its six month birthday. WP7applist says that 186 apps are updated on average each day. In the last 24 hours, 131 apps were updated and 262 were added.

Windows Phone 7 launched on October 26 with 1,000 applications available. Six months later and the platform has increased impressively. Microsoft appears to be building up a good momentum amongst application developers. Microsoft says it now has over 40,000 Windows Phone application developers, who deliver an average of 100 new apps per day.

Despite delays with its first platform update, “NoDo”, developers have a lot to look forward to this year. Microsoft’s new Nokia partnership is a great opportunity for new and existing developers as more and more consumers take advantage of Windows Phone. Nokia said recently that it plans to ship Windows Phone branded devices to developers when they are available later this year. “Mango”, the codename for what will likely be named Windows Phone 7.5, is currently in the final development stages at Microsoft. The software giant revealed a number of new enhancements recently and promised over 500 features at launch. Nokia has also promised a batch of Windows Phone Mango devices, due later this year.

  • GP007

    Nice, keep em coming,  Mango should see a large boost to numbers later this year with all the new features and APIs devs can now mess with.

  • http://www.facebook.com/osman.kalkavan Osman Kalkavan

    I’m more interested in the scrolling+performance issues (ppl say they are caused by the API’s themselves which will be corrected in mango).

    Bring on good scrolling and more responsive apps and WP7 will have the BEST 3rd party app experience over any other platform – most of the good apps are the best versions on any platform anyway.

    • Guest

      From my developer experience, because you’re programming in such a high-level language, you have to be very careful in the way you do things in order to keep things responsive ( and sometimes you can’t do what you want – e.g. have many items in a list that are of a variable height without compromising on performance). I believe the scrolling (as well as simple animations) is now being done on a seperate thread (under the control of the OS) which has the sole purpose of doing this kind of stuff (and hence is responsive).

      The mango tools should improve the scrolling experience, and open up some important features, e.g. allows us to update “live” tiles (right now, you can only make the image static, or point it at some image on the internet, which isn’t very conveinient), through the 3rd-party multi-tasking that’s available – many users were complaining at developers about this, not understanding that it’s actually a “technical” constraint with the current tools and software (not lazyness by the developer).

    • http://www.facebook.com/osman.kalkavan Osman Kalkavan

      so your saying that right now (noDo update) as a dev you cant update live tiles in anyway? I must have mis-interpeted that, you can at least throw in notification numbers, and flickr seems to manage to change the picture on it’s live tile every hour (though, granted that might be done by pointing it to a picture on the net that they update every now and then).

    • Anonymous

      Developers can change the image that’s displayed on the tile, and increase a counter. That’s pretty much it.

      In mango, developers will have more possibilites when working with them.

    • Anonymous

      I love Flickr but its WP7 app is a major PITA when you try to scroll up and down the comment or EXIF data page. After the Mango beta update, the problem disappeared.

  • Robin Ashe

    Once you take into account that Windows Phone has trials available for paid apps, it’s actually growing faster than the iTunes App Store was. Naturally that’s as it should be as everyone knows apps are where it’s at, so there should be that much more support, but the massive lead it has over Android at the same time is even more impressive.

    • http://www.facebook.com/osman.kalkavan Osman Kalkavan

      yea, this should be especially pointed out by MS and promoted so.

      If you look at it that way, (according to http://www.windowsphoneapplist.com/stats/ ) it now has 4500+ apps with trials.

      Convert that to “lite” apps and you basicly have 30k apps.

      That is immense imo. Android is at what, 200k now?
      Windows phone (DESPITE the sales) has 30k in less then a year (more like 7-8 months).

      More importantly, the general app quality is great, i’ve bought a fair number of them already and have not regretted 1 purchase so far.

      Kudos for the trial system!

  • http://twitter.com/s_a_r_k_i_s sarkis chamelian

    I WANT THEM ALL !!! lol

  • Anonymous

    Anyone notice though, most of the new apps all look the same? Like rss readers with blue toolbars etc? Or just browsers that load a specific website?

    • Anonymous

      That’s sure looking at the glass half empty. There are still too many repeats but there has been a surge of great, official apps in the last few weeks. Cartoon TV is my favourite new one and one of the best period.

  • http://twitter.com/alexwilks88 Alex Wilks

    Amazing to think that my 2 year old Pre has, what, 6,000?

  • http://spartdan.co.uk SPARTdAN

    There’s A LOT of useless apps making up this statistic, such as just shortcuts to web pages and related.

    Though it’s good to see people adopting Windows Phone Apps. :)

    • Anonymous

      No there is not. Microsoft doesn’t count shortcuts, and umpteen different fart apps as separate apps. WP7 market place has the highest percentage of quality apps, behind iOS, and it’s not far behind that. It’s certainly a better market place than Android in terms of quality to quantity.

  • http://w1ngnut.myopenid.com/ w1ngnut

    More importantly, some strong names coming to WP7 such as Angry Birds, Fox News, British Airways, Amazon, etc. Not to say that the platform already has most of the biggest ‘franchises’.

    But of course, those numbers are important to convince people to make a switch to WP7 =)

  • Anonymous

    I think the Mango beta might actually slow some App releases over the summer as Devs just shift development time to Mango.

    • Dhaoracle

      You don’t think that Microsoft have thought about this already??

  • justin

    you can view wp7 apps with bing - http://www.bing.com/visualsearch?g=wp7&mkt=en-us#toc=0

    • JustPassingThru

      Thanks for that.!

  • justin

    you can view wp7 apps with bing - http://www.bing.com/visualsearch?g=wp7&mkt=en-us#toc=0

  • SreenuBojja2

    There are only 21000 apps in marketplace, remaining 4000 are deleted by owners. wait for few more weeks to celebrate this

    • Anonymous

      There are 4000 inactive apps but they can come back any time as we’re already seen this happen many times.

  • SreenuBojja2

    There are only 21000 apps in marketplace, remaining 4000 are deleted by owners. wait for few more weeks to celebrate this

  • http://twitter.com/laserfloyd Lewis McCrary

    Despite some horrible/useless apps in there, as of late some big name apps have made their way into the marketplace.  Over at WPCentral they’re keeping up with the releases.  A few solid apps will always trump hordes of useless ones.

  • Anonymous

    The WP7 dev relations team at Microsoft is EXCELLENT. We met at SXSW and they are super cool.

  • Anonymous

    Lots of iOS/Android apps are being ported over.