50,000+: Another WinPhone Marketplace Apps Milestone ...
... was reached slightly ahead of Consensus Guestimates -- i.e. ahead of early January. Growth is accelerating
There are several charts and tables in the article that are not included in this excerp below.
>> Windows Phone Marketplace Passes 50,000 Apps
Rafe Blanford
All About Windows phone (AAWP)
December 27th 2011
allaboutwindowsphone.com
The Windows Phone Marketplace has now passed the 50,000 app and games submission mark. Content is being added at the rate of 265 items per day. At the time of writing, 50,126 items have been published. Of these, 17,276 were added in the last 90 days and 8,010 were added in the last 30 days. These items come from 13,002 different publishers.
The 50,000 mark, which has been reached sooner than we estimated, is a key milestone, but more important is the accelerating growth of the Marketplace. It took just over a year to get to 40,000 apps, but just 40 days to add the next 10,000 apps. That bodes well for Windows Phone in 2012.
In common with other application stores, the total number of published items is not the same as the number of items available to consumers. Of the 50,126 items published to the Marketplace, just under 6,000 are no longer available (removed by Microsoft or withdrawn by the publisher). In addition, some apps are only available in select markets. This means the number of available items to a consumer, in a given market, is lower than the number of published items. The current approximate figures are: US (42,655), UK (40,305), France (39,235), Spain (37,027), Italy (36,944), Germany (36,958), Australia (37,024), India (36,752) and Singapore (36,922).
During the last four weeks, an average of around 265 new content items have been added each day. When the Marketplaces reached 40,000 items (November 16th 2011) this rate was 165 items per day, which means the rate of addition is accelerating.
The last few weeks have seen an acceleration in the rate of submissions. There are two likely causes here: firstly the expanded availability of the Windows Phone Marketplace geographically (extended from 16 to 35 countries) and secondly the release of Nokia's first Windows Phone devices.
Content by category and license
The chart below shows the proportion of content in each of the Windows Phone Marketplace's top level categories. Entertainment is the single biggest category (7,543 items). The next three biggest categories are books + reference (7,014 items), games (6,991) and tools + productivity (6797 items). The four biggest categories (out of seventeen) make up 57% of the content.
58% of items in the Windows Phone Marketplace are free, 14% are paid with a free trial and 29% are paid. By comparison the free / paid ratio for Android is approximately 69% / 31% and for iOS is approximately 43% / 57%.
Comparison with Android and iOS
Both Android and iOS (both 500,000+) have at least ten times more apps available than Windows Phone. However, this metric is, for obvious reasons, strongly correlated to how long an app store has been in operation. A more interesting comparison is too look at their relative performance.
Windows Phone has taken just under 14 months to reach the 50,000 milestone. Android took 19 months (October 2008 - April 2010) to reach 50,000 apps, reflecting Android's relatively slow start in terms of device licensees. iOS took 12 months (July 2008 - June 2009) to reach the same figure, but arguably had an avantage given it had an installed based of around 4 million first generation iPhones before the App Store launched.
This relative comparison would suggest Windows Phone Market place is a credible challenger to both Apple's App Store and Google's Marketplace in terms of app metrics.
About
These numbers are from our own tracking system, which is also used to power the All About Windows Phone Apps & Games section, where you can browse all of the applications and games, and install them via links to Zune Desktop, the web based Marketplace, or install them directly by scanning the QR Code with Bing Vision on your smartphone. ###
- Eric - |
