Latest Distimo Report looks at the first month in business for the Windows Store and compares it to other app stores. As you probably already know, Microsoft launched its store to allow users to easily download and update software on the system. This is already common practice on all mobile phones, with one main difference: downloading third party applications on the Web is much more difficult and is disabled on many mobile phones, including iOS and Windows Phone 7. Moreover, many consumers were used to finding software online for their PC. Distimo, however, believes the Windows Store will become an important channel in digital software distribution, which is why it already support it. Here are the major findings from their report:
- Microsoft did a good job in giving local content more visibility in the Windows Store. Overall 10% of all applications in the rankings are locally popular only. In Japan and South Korea, for example, 41% and 30% (respectively) of all top 300 applications are locally popular only. The Windows Store currently features a total of 21,183 applications worldwide, however only 13,844 (65%) are available in North America. In comparison, this ratio is above 85% in most app stores.
- One month after the official launch, there are already more than 20K applications available in the Windows Store. However, there’s still a long way to go to reach the amount of apps in the Apple App Store or Google Play, which both have over 600K available titles. On the other hand, there has been no store thus far that had that many available applications after just one month in business.
- When we look at the PC stores (x86 and x64) and the Surface (ARM) store we see one clear difference: the PC stores share a lot of characteristics with the Apple Mac App Store like price and the type of popular applications, while the surface store shares more in common with the tablet and phone app stores.
And you can get Distimo’s full report from here.