According to a site called WindowsPhoneApplist there are now over 25,000 applications available for Microsoft’s new Windows Phone platform. With Windows Phone having launched back in late October 2010, that would mean that it’s taken between 8 and 9 months to achieve this figure. For the sake of comparison, Apple announced that it has 25,000 apps in their App Store in March 2009, 7 months after they even made applications available in the first place. So how should we treat Microsoft’s milestone? With congratulations, because they’re nearly as good as Apple, or with punishment, because now that developers know they can make a living off of a mobile apps, we were expecting the number of applications available to be even higher at this point in time? It’s tough to say, but there’s something even more important here, and that’s the number of Windows Phone users out there in the first place.
Depending on who you ask, there are between 3 and 4 million people using Windows Phone at the moment, meaning there are more people using Microsoft’s old mobile operating system compared to the number using their new one. Now yes, people are waiting to see how the platform evolves before diving in, and then there’s the massive group of people who want to wait until Nokia starts pumping out Windows Phone handsets, but still … shouldn’t the alarms be going off at Microsoft if their platform is being adopted in such partly numbers?
Later this month we’re going to see everyone report their Q2 2011 financial results and that should give us some color as to how Windows Phone has either gained traction or fallen to the wayside thanks to Google’s Android OS. If we had to make any predictions, we’d say things aren’t looking too good since people are deciding to save their pennies for Mango, the huge update to Windows Phone that promises to bring over 500 new features to the platform.
[Via: Boy Genius Report]