Windows Phone Marketplace hits 35,000 applications after a year

By Tom Warren, on 24th Oct 11 10:02 am with 31 Comments

35,000 apps in the Windows Phone Marketplace

Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace has now reached 35,000 applications.

WP7applist is tracking 35,218 applications worldwide and explains 5,100 of them are inactive, 52% are available for free and the average price is $1.70 per paid application. Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace is growing at a steady rate. The Marketplace passed 15,000 apps in April just in time for its six month birthday. WP7applist says that 191 apps are updated on average each day. In the last 24 hours, 26 apps were updated and 60 were added.

Windows Phone 7 launched on October 21 with 1,000 applications available in its first week on the market. A year later and the Marketplace is blooming with 35,000 apps. Microsoft appears to be building up a good momentum amongst application developers. Microsoft recently finalized its Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” update and has distributed it to over 50% of existing devices. Microsoft’s device partners are also preparing a number of new Windows Phone 7.5 devices for the holiday season, see an overview of all of them here.

Microsoft’s work with Nokia will be unveiled on Wednesday. Both companies are planning to unveil the Nokia Windows Phone “experience” during Nokia World 2011 in London this week. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and Windows Phone president Andy Lees both revealed last week that Nokia plans to unveil its Windows Phone offerings at Nokia World. Final press shots of Nokia’s 800 Windows Phone leaked last week and revealed that the company is planning blue, pink and black variants of its “Searay” device. A number of different codenames and specification lists have emerged over the past few weeks, none of them yet confirmed. Nokia appears to be preparing at least two Windows Phone devices, to be made available in select markets in November.

  • http://twitter.com/goofbox Ramanan

    awesome!!! am starting my own windows phone 7 campaign to market this amazing OS :) …going to lend my Samsung Focus with Mango to my good friends for one week and let them try it out. I have no doubt in my mind it will convert them :p

  • http://www.facebook.com/simon.andrews Simon Andrews

    I’ve gotta wonder about the quality of those apps. Not sure it’s a good thing that 60 apps were added, but only 26 updated – suggests to me that a lot of these apps (even most) are just being put up there and left to die.

    • BucksterMcgee

      What??? That’s neither here or there. In fact those number for the past 24 hours are basically useless, especially in the context you’re trying to imply. In fact the previous sentence to that one states that on average 191 apps are update each day.

      Furthermore, your suggestion that apps are being put up and left to die doesn’t make sense, as many apps don’t need to be updated and the number of times an app is updated has little to no correlation to it’s success.

      Some apps are never updated, not because they they aren’t successful, useful, or popular but because they were written correctly once, and uploaded once. Netflix is a great example of this that was only updated once in it’s entire existence, but even that update was minor, and did little if anything to actually change that app. I personally use that app all the time, and besides doing a one time update to add Mango functionality, there would be little to no benefit from it receiving “more” updates. That goes the same for a lot of what I would call tier 1, or AAA apps, that are written and designed with a high quality and then released, rather than releasing earlier but updating constantly to slow add and correct functionality; more on that later.

       Other apps might be updated all the time, but yet are not successful, useful, or popular. On the other side of the spectrum, I have quite a few what I would call “indie” apps, from devs who are far lessen known than others. Some of these apps are better than others, but despite them being updated what seems like every few days, I can’t say that they necessarily qualify as being at the quality that other larger devs have brought. That said, some of these apps have been incredibly promising, and started off as what seemed like a waste but have grown into some of my favorite and most used apps. These apps often get lots of updates, and the devs are working hard to bring new and exicting features. I find myself to strive to be one of these type of devs myself.

      Then there are large waves of apps that have been “updated” simply just to add Mango functionality, then never updated again, because they don’t need it. Some days I have 14 updates waiting, on others I have none. And the amount of updates in no ways correlates to the quality of these apps. It only correlates to the number of times an app has been updated.

      Hell, new apps could be heavily out numbering the number of apps that are updated daily, but that still doesn’t have any correlation to the quality or success of either new apps or apps that have not updated often. That’s like saying the number of times your dye your hair vs the number of times you cut your hair correlates to how many people like your current hair style… those two different measures don’t relate to the 3rd and barely relate to each other.

      In anycase, what really matters is that the marketplace is growing steadily, and the apps that do exist are quite great. Many of the tier 1/AAA apps that exist on all platforms are just a better experience on WP7/7.5, thanks to the development process, platform, and metro. And for the few heavily desired apps that aren’t available yet, like Skype, Audible, etc they have already been confirmed that they are coming to the platform soon enough, and I have no doubt that those experiences will be the best on any platform as well.

      That said, I was hoping and expecting more of an exponential growth in apps rather than the fairly linear growth we’ve had, but the additions in Mango as well as new hardware and partners could very well bring the start of such boundless growth.

    • Adam

      to many words

    • Guest

      too few letters

    • Monkey D Black

      no u just have a very short attention span

    • OMG55

      That’s why MS said their focusing on “quality not quantity”, to prevent as many garbage apps from hitting the marketplace.

    • http://twitter.com/hchooley Matt Baldwin

      Too late.

  • http://twitter.com/OldCongress Gamer

    Windows phone is actually a very good platform for application, i made a metal detector app 2 weeks ago and it has already gotten its first 1000 download while Android was plagued with barely 10, will continue on investing more on windows phone..
    So far that single app already yield 30 usd in ads.

    • Anonymous

      Wait I thought WP7 only had fart & social networky apps, not serious stuff like iOS has!

    • http://twitter.com/ama_neden ama neden

      someone, please make him find his cave!

    • Abiddine

      ArrowSmith guy is troll. His comments are always anti-microsoft. Don’t pay attention to him

  • http://techin5.com Jubbin Grewal @Techin5.com

    I think books count as apps as well. For the last few nights I’ve been monitoring all the new apps, and some 100 books were posted as apps which I think ruins the true value of the Market.

    Nevertheless, iOS probably has 40,000 fart apps so considering it’s hard to find many fart apps in the Marketplace, it’s off to a good start.

    • Guest

      In fact WP7 has trial apps. No those “free” and “full” as two separate apps.

  • Andreas Balzer

    @Tom Warren: Can you please explain, why it’s important to know the quantity of apps in the marketplace? It should be about quality, not quantity! It’s not like ‘I’ll buy an XYZ because i can download the most apps there!’, is it?

    • http://twitter.com/zeduffman Luke

      How would you objectively quantify the quality of apps into a simple format?

    • phil jay

      That’s what I’m looking for. Imaging them not talking about how many apps they have, but rather how ‘good’ they are.

    • Andreas Balzer

      Thinking about criteria to use. The rest is graphics design.

    • http://www.winrumors.com Tom W

      App discover-ability and the amount of apps are easy metrics to judge a platform by.

    • Andreas Balzer

      A metrics should not be used just to have it but to make a point, or to prove something. Quantity is not about app discover-ability. It’s actually inverse. The more apps there are, the less one specific app or a generic app to do something specific can be discovered easily. I don’t think a platform can be judged by the amount of apps either. The platform isn’t doing what the apps are doing and neither can one app or a group of apps be used to judge a platform. If you want to judge different platforms, judge them by criteria that define the platforms, e.g. features, ease to use, …

    • GP007

      No one says otherwise but quantity of apps is a metric that shows how much support and live the platform and ecosystem as a whole has.    It’s a valuable insight  and regardless, it is a marketing tool.  Every android ad I’ve seen on TV talks about “thousands of apps” that you can get etc. 

    • Andreas Balzer

      “No one says otherwise but quantity of apps is a metric that shows how much support and live the platform and ecosystem as a whole has.”
      Trust me, that’s not the case. Support could be measured by a standardization of how many apps there are, relatively compared to how often they get updated, considering the amount of functionality they still lack and the amount of work the developers/designers/… want to put into them in general.

      “It’s a valuable insight [...]”
      No. It’s neither valuable nor is it an insight.

      “[...]  and regardless, it is a marketing tool. [...]”
      No. This is PR only.

      “[...] Every android ad I’ve seen on TV talks about “thousands of apps” that you can get etc.”
      Yes but they don’t, or more specifically, wouldn’t say how many there are in total.

  • Anonymous

    Windows Phone Marketplace is throttling up! Expect 100,000+ apps when Apollo lands.

  • Anonymous

    awesome. no doubt we’ll pass blackberry in a few months and catch up with android which will inevitably stall as anybody who has ever made an android app will begin to look at wp7 as a fresh alternative to stand out.

    • Lord Jem

      How much apps does blackverry have…i thought they would have passed them already

    • Jon Robinson

      last count was 46,000

  • http://www.gamerelatedblog.com/ StriderNo9

    I just want some of the heavy hitters like Twitter and IMDB to get updated. It’s sad and retarded that Twitter has not done a single thing since it’s been put up there.

    • Usman masood

      Who needs the Twitter app after Mango?

    • http://twitter.com/hchooley Matt Baldwin

      Well, I still prefer to read my Twitter feed separately from my Facebook, etc feeds.  So I still use the apps.

    • http://www.gamerelatedblog.com/ StriderNo9

      I sort of do, because from what I read, sending pictures to Twitter through Mango sends a giant ass link to Skydrive for people to view my photo. Not entirely sure I like that idea yet, but of course I haven’t tried it. Also Mango, from what I read doesn’t support hasttags or trend searching. So it would be nice if the official Twitter app got updated for those few things.

  • http://twitter.com/Logan_Nowak LoganScar

    My first app should be certified by tonight. Feels good, man.